01 | December | 2023 | The Ancient Gaming Noob

The next shiny new thing for WoW Classic landed yesterday, WoW Classic Season of Discovery.

WoW Classic – Season of Discovery

Announced back at BlizzCon, this is Blizzard’s attempt to inject something new into the classic milieu by introducing the concept of runes that give classes new abilities, all set in the first 25 levels of the original vanilla WoW framework. (Though with the client out now, the data mining has begun and there is already evidence that the next increment will bring the cap to level 40 and introduce a raid version of Gnomeregan.)

Blizz has summed up Season of Discovery as follows:

- Discover Your Playstyle

Hidden throughout Azeroth are special runes waiting to be discovered. These runes can augment player characters in new and exciting ways by providing access to abilities not available in WoW Classic. Some runes will be in plain sight, others will be tucked away, and a few will require teamwork to access.

Freedom to Experiment

Rune engraving will allow players to apply and remove abilities at will as they experiment with different builds to create a truly unique play experience.

A New Approach to Endgame

Season of Discovery will start with an initial level cap of 25. Over time, the cap will incrementally increase to offer a more progressive endgame experience that will shift with each level band as new abilities become available for players during level-up.

Classic Dungeons Reimagined

Each phase’s level cap will provide new content for players to experience, starting with the level 25 Blackfathom Deeps 10-player raid: formerly a level-up 5-player dungeon, it has been reworked with redesigned boss encounters to offer exciting challenges that will put players’ builds to the test.

Put Your Builds and Skills to the Test

For players more interested in testing their builds and skills against others, there will be an outdoor PvP event in Ashenvale. Additionally, the Honor system and Battlegrounds will be available from day one.

How sticky that mixture will be remains to be seen, but when the servers went live an a bit past 1pm Pacific Time yesterday there was a rush to get in to the few servers available, which quickly filled up.

Seasonal Servers List

I had a friend tell me that the queue for the Wild Growth server was as over 3K deep shortly after the servers went live and even on Lava Lash, where our group planned to go, there was something of a queue.

That is not so bad

And, once I was in and made my first character, I was greeted by scenes reminiscent of the opening day of WoW Classic back in 2019, with a mass of new players piled up on the starting point in the dwarf and gnome starting zone.

I guess you heard about the new servers

And, as with 2019, players were swarming the landscape and cleansing the area of all quest related mobs.

Hey, save some for me

So things were off to a brisk start, though some of that seemed to be the rush to reserve names and that sort of thing with people piling up characters in the creator. Later in the afternoon the queue for Wild Growth seemed to have subsided and the starter area on Lava Lash… well, I managed to tag a mob or two.

The server queues going down was most likely due to Blizz raising the cap on the server populations slowly as people made it past the initial quests in the starter zones, though they have announced that there will be a new PvP-RP server added to the US region to accommodate demand.

This may change as we arrive at the weekend and people are able to give the new servers their full attention. We shall see. It will be interesting to see how things play out in a server environment capped at level 25. And I haven’t begun to think about how people will be out harvesting runes.

Anyway, the Season of Discovery is off and running.