A full day of downtime and you can’t even buy level 58 boosts yet!
Or maybe you just can’t redeem and apply them yet. It would be odd for Blizz to not take your money up front on anything.
I mention that because now that there is an actual launch date for TBC, the WoW Classic subreddit has taken boosts on as their primary topic to complain about. Also because Blizz’s announcement this morning isn’t about the pre-patch, but what you can buy with the coming of the pre-patch.
Well, until this morning. This morning brought other problems to complain about, including the AU server merged with the US mega server without warning… and boosts being delayed. The boosts found their way in there still. The WoW Classic subreddit remains lit.
But the pre-patch has arrived… after much delay… so you’ll also be able to roll up Dranei and Blood Elves and the Horde will get paladins and the Alliance will get shaman… and you’ll be able to buy boosts for them all!
Then the expansion goes live on February 5th.
That feels like a bit of a short run, though not as short as last time I guess. This time though Blizz is going to drop the Midnight expansion pre-patch right on top of that launch.
Anyway, the road to World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade Classic Anniversary Edition is open before us, and soon players will be streaming into Outland.
World of Warcraft The Burning Crusade Classic Anniversary Edition… logo or something
I had to piece that graphic together myself because the Blizz press kit site has somehow forgotten about the whole thing, preferring to focus on Midnight and housing in retail instead. Go figure.
Meanwhile, the name of this phase of classic is almost out of control.
What is the acronym for that even? WOWTBCCAE?
That seems a bit over wrought, but so does the whole venture at this point.
I’ve been eye rolling pretty hard at the fans who have been calling WoW Classic Anniversary Edition the waiting room for The Burning Crusade… for over a year now. I mean Blizz has slow rolled this so much that I started to feel sympathetic for the crazies.
But timing is something Blizz has pretty consistently failed to master when it comes to WoW. They can’t ship an expansion in under two years and when the finally do ship it has about a year’s worth of content. Or less. Though maybe Shadowlands had a plan for that much content, it was just so bad that nobody stuck around to experience it.
And so it goes with their WoW Classic experiments, where they have felt that letting expansions linger for 12 months or more is fine, not understanding that players consume old content at an extremely accelerated rate.
So I feel for the TBC fans who have waited way too long for this moment. Not as much as I should probably, but that is because they all seem to have forgotten what happened the last time we had The Burning Crusade Classic… and Blizz did all the things they are doing now, selling special packs and level boosts and such. Have we all forgotten what happened to the /spit command the last time they rolled TBC Classic?
I mean, maybe I am wrong. Maybe there is some untapped need for Outland out in the world that was somehow not sated by the last run… which went live on June 1, 2021, less than five years ago.
Is five years enough of a gap to rekindle nostalgia? Will there be as big of a crowd at the Dark Portal this time around? I mean, they are consolidating things down to a mega server, there had better be I guess.
There was a quest giver in there somewhere in that scrum
All I know is that I came out of the 2021 run feeling my bias against the expansion had been confirmed.
Anyway, good luck to those who plan to venture through the dark portal once more. And to those who will make the choice to stay in vanilla WoW. No cloning option this time, you need to pick one path or the other.
I shan’t be joining in this time around, but I will be watching from the sidelines to see what Blizzard does.
If Blizzard does anything.
Among other things, we’re about to the end of last year’s roadmap.
Blizzard WoW Classic 2025 Roadmap
There is nothing on there about what, if anything, comes after Mists of Pandaria Classic, which has been hanging around since mid-July of last year. I guess that means there is still at least eight months left to go for it, given how Blizz has done timing so far.
As I mentioned previously, my gut is that retail WoW is going to be the sole focus this year and that WoW Classic is going to be mostly ignored… largely due to retail solving is content problems by running a classic remix in the back half of every retail expansion. Who needs classic when you have a remaix… or, more importantly, nobody on the retail team wants their remix options constrained by classic.
We’ll see how that plays out.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 