World of Warcraft News and Raiding Strategies

User Interface and Accessibility

• Fixed an issue where the camera’s field of view could be increased past 90.
  
  • Developers’ note: The ability to restrict the field of view was added in 9.2.5 as an accessibility measure to help alleviate motion sickness. All of World of Warcraft -- the art, combat mechanics, and player interactions -- are built within the parameters of the user interface experience and scale. Increasing the field of view beyond the limit that has been in place since WoW launched was not intended.
    

Burning Crusade Classic

• [With realm restarts] To address a bug that prevented Midsummer Fire Festival bonfire quests from resetting for players who previously completed them, all Midsummer bonfire quests will be reset. This includes any yearly quests that players might have completed for the first time since the event began at 12:01 a.m. on June 21.
  
  • Developers' note: This fix requires that we restart all realms, so to get the fix applied as soon as possible, we're preforming realm restarts soon during off-peak hours in each region.
    

Welcome to the Wrath of the Lich King Classic Beta!
The team has been working hard to get Northrend ready for you to jump in and begin your adventures, and we’re excited to have you join us! Over the coming weeks we will post notes and updates in this forum with each new update to the Beta.

Beta Test Release Build 44301 - June 22, 2022

Level Cap: 76

Focus:

• Questing/Level-up Experience
• Northrend Zones
• Dungeons
• New Spells, Talents, and Abilities
• Death Knight Starting Experience
• New Systems and Features:
  
  • Revamped Group Finder
  • Vehicles
  • Quest phasing
  • Glyphs and Inscription
    Note: To facilitate Glyph testing, a Glyph Vendor has been placed in Dalaran, near the Inscription building.

The Wrath of the Lich King Classic beta test has begun! Over the course of the test, we’ll be inviting opt-in beta testers and more to check out the upcoming Classic expansion and give us feedback.

Players selected to participate in the beta test will receive an email invitation directing them to download the beta client directly from the Battle.net desktop app. As always, please be aware of phishing attempts—if you’re unsure whether your invitation is legitimate, please log in to your Battle.net account to verify that there is a Wrath of the Lich King Classic beta license attached (under Your Game Accounts).

If you haven't received an invite this time, don’t forget to sign up for the beta* for your chance to participate. Additional invite waves will happen as we get further into development.

Getting Started

If you’ve been selected to participate in the beta test, your Battle.net account will already be flagged for access.

• Make sure your graphics drivers are up to date.
  
• Run the Battle.net desktop app—it may need to update itself if you haven’t run it recently. If you don’t have the app installed, get started here.
  
• Once Battle.net is installed and updated, select World of Warcraft from the list of games.
  
• In the Game Version drop-down menu above the Play button, choose the Wrath of the Lich King Classic Beta (listed under In Development) option, then click Install.
  
• Allow installation to complete, click Play and select any of the available Test Servers.
  
• Create a new test character or copy over a character from your live Burning Crusade Classic account using the Copy Character button.
  
• Enter the game and test the content.

If you have issues installing and operating the Wrath of the Lich King beta, please check our Common Technical Issues and Solutions to begin troubleshooting.

Providing Feedback

We’d love to hear about your experiences in Wrath of the Lich King Classic, so once you’ve had a chance to play, please send us your feedback on the Wrath of the Lich King Classic beta forums, or follow the discussion on the WoW Community Council forums.

*Accounts must have an active World of Warcraft subscription or game time in order to be eligible for beta access selection.

Wrath of the Lich King Classic provides new opportunities to make a few changes that will improve the gameplay experience in the next chapter of Classic WoW. In this Developer Update, the World of Warcraft Classic Team takes you through some of those changes and what they can mean for the future of Wrath Classic.

#SomeChanges
When World of Warcraft Classic first launched, it followed a very strict design pillar: #NoChanges. At Blizzard, we faithfully recreated World of Warcraft as it existed in 2006, with as few changes as possible, while still making it able to run in the more modern environment of 2019. But World of Warcraft didn’t stop in 2006. It continued to evolve and change over the years. So, we re-released the Burning Crusade expansion last year in 2021, and plans are underway to re-release the Wrath of the Lich King expansion.

However, as we re-release these expansions, we find the design pillar #NoChanges isn’t sufficient anymore. With World of Warcraft’s expansions came design changes to the game, and some of those changes were not consistent with the way Classic World of Warcraft felt. It’s undeniable that the latest 2021 modern expansion, Shadowlands, feels very different than the original launching game in 2004. Where should the evolution of the game stop, if we want to retain that Classic feel even while releasing new content? Many players today choose to play Classic WoW because they love that feel, and don’t want it to be lost. The World of Warcraft Classic team has given this a lot of thought, and we would like to share with you today our design pillars for what we call #SomeChanges.

Nurture and Protect Social Experiences
The first and most important design pillar is: Nurture and Protect Social Experiences. The compelling social experiences within World of Warcraft are why many of us first fell in love with the game. To retain these experiences, we want to help players build friendships and deepen their relationships within parties, raid teams, guilds, and server communities. Online social experiences are a complex phenomenon and can be very easy to damage. Positive relationships build community, reduce toxicity, and forge friendships that have kept players coming back to our game for many years. We need to nurture and protect these relationships. One very big key to this is providing “Social Proximity” in our game, or what some cognitive scientists call “Repeat serendipitous interactions”. Put a little more simply, you need multiple interactions over time with the same people in a way that feels happy or beneficial. Classic WoW provided this in abundance, where you would often meet the same people from day to day while running through the Stranglethorn Jungle, on your way to a Scarlet Monastery run, or heading into Blackrock Mountain for a raid. As we roll out new expansions for WoW Classic, the pillar of protecting this Social Proximity helps inform our decisions about features like dungeons, raids, quests, phasing, and tools for finding party and raid members. When we make changes to Wrath of the Lich King Classic, we will make changes that help maintain Social Proximity, and in so doing, nurture and protect social experiences.

Approachable and Familiar
Another important design value for us is: Approachable and Familiar. We want you to feel like you are coming home to a place you know well. Classic’s combat pacing is more deliberate. Class designs are more familiar, with fewer changes from patch to patch. Classic often tells simpler stories about a particular place and time. We love to see players with intrinsic motivations founded on exploration, experimentation, and wonder, in addition to pursuing more powerful items and epic storylines. Classic WoW provides players with a sense of agency over their character’s destiny, telling their own player story about how they explored and interacted with the world. Dungeons and raids in Classic are most often defeated through careful preparation: collecting consumables, perfecting gear sets, mastering class skills, and memorizing encounter details. We want to maintain that approachability and familiarity.

This pillar works to limit the changes we make, as that familiarity can be easily damaged. But it also encourages us to make changes when an excessively complex system can be reworked into something more elegant and easier to understand. A good example of this can be found in the Emblem system from Wrath of the Lich King, which became needlessly complex and confusing by the time we defeated Arthas. We’re planning for each raid tier of Emblems to work the same, with one Emblem dropped by the latest raids and used to purchase gear equivalent to those raids, plus a second Emblem dropped by dungeons and older raids and used to purchase less powerful items. We’re hoping a few small changes there can make the system more approachable for everyone, but still fill the cherished role it served in the original Wrath of the Lich King.

The World is the Main Character
The third and final design pillar of the Classic WoW team is: The World is the Main Character. We want you to maintain the feeling of being immersed in a living world (of Warcraft). We love your exploration and your player-driven stories and want to make sure you have a reason to visit various locations in the world over and over again. Gathering and crafting professions are important to that sense of world, and of its economy, where you are interacting with thousands of other players in a vibrant player community. This pillar means we need to preserve the world we have created from excessive changes. You should be able to collect the lost pages of the Green Hills of Stranglethorn, to rescue the town of Darkshire from Stitches, or to return to Tempest Keep and face off against Prince Kael’thas one more time (and hope for rare mount drop). You should be able to tell your personally unique stories about your exploits, even as you follow along the epic stories of Azeroth’s most famous personalities.

Wrath of the Lich King Itemization Changes
Those pillars can come across feeling very abstract. So, we want to give you a concrete example of how we are applying them to changes for Wrath of the Lich King Classic (WotLK). We’re taking a hard look at itemization in that expansion and have decided to make some changes we think will help improve the experience. Taking our pillars and applying them to itemization, we’ve come up with four goals for making changes to WotLK itemization:

• Foster a vibrant player ecosystem engaging in all WotLK instanced content.
  
  • Serves: Nurture and Protect Social Experiences
    
• Maintain a healthy density of players enjoying Heroic dungeons throughout the entire expansion.
  
  • Serves: Nurture and Protect Social Experiences and Approachable and Familiar
    
• Preserve nostalgic itemization elements.
  
  • Serves: Approachable and Familiar and The World is the Main Character
    
• Provide a consistent itemization scheme across all expansion phases.
  
  • Serves: Approachable and Familiar
    

That first goal is all about nurturing our WoW communities. We know players in Burning Crusade Classic have experienced a great environment with raiding. Players are active in multiple raids at all four raid tiers, participating in both 10-player and 25-player raids, and raiding with their alts and in pickup groups at all tiers. We want to make sure that continues in WotLK. To further this, we've been exploring a lot of ideas that we've decided not to implement at this time, such as 10-player and 25-player raids dropping the same items, Heroic dungeons getting improved drops, or increasing the starting difficulty of Heroic dungeons. One change we have decided to make, is to increase the health and damage of monsters in Naxxramas. Our 2008 design intention was for it to be a little easier than the 2006 original, but we missed the mark and it ended up much easier than we intended. Bringing up the difficulty a bit will make for a more fun and interesting challenge while awaiting the opening of Ulduar.

The second goal is about making sure Heroic dungeons stay attractive throughout the entire expansion. The Emblems and items they drop should always be valuable, even late in the expansion. They should also remain an interesting challenge throughout the entire expansion, rather than becoming excessively easy as your gear improves. We are exploring plans to add challenges to Heroic dungeons as the expansion proceeds, which would also provide more valuable rewards.

We also want to preserve nostalgic itemization. No matter what changes we make, we will ensure all WotLK raid and dungeon items can still be acquired, as well as their unique art.

Finally, the itemization and raid lock systems for Wrath of the Lich King evolved several times during the expansion. Rather than changing per phase, we want to make it more consistent. This means that Emblems should drop and work in the same way every tier, set pieces should be acquired the same way every tier, and ideally raid lockouts should function the same way every tier. To support this, both 10-player raids and 25-player raids will drop Emblems of Valor at launch, while dungeons will drop Emblems of Heroism, matching the design pattern for Emblems that was used in Trial of the Crusader and Icecrown Citadel.

#SomeChanges
We hope that this glimpse of the in-progress itemization design helps you better understand how we plan to adhere to these pillars as we move forward. Each time we consider a change to the Wrath of the Lich King experience, we will keep these pillars in mind: Nurture and Protect Social Experiences, Approachable and Familiar, and The World is the Main Character. If the change doesn’t serve them, then we won’t make it. But, if the change can strengthen those pillars, we will carefully consider it. As always, our goal is to deliver the best possible World of Warcraft Classic experience to you, our dedicated players.

We look forward to your feedback and we’ll see you in Northrend!

As we continue work on Wrath of the Lich King Classic, we want to celebrate the defeat of Kil’Jaeden and the Burning Legion (again!) with a bit of a special event to help get players ready for their adventures in Northrend.

In the coming weeks, we will implement a global buff that we’re calling “Joyous Journeys”. During the time this buff is active, all sources of experience points will award 50% additional XP.

We haven’t locked down the specific timeframe for when this buff will activate, but we expect it to last for at least 6-8 weeks; beginning a few weeks before the 3.4.0 Pre-Patch and persisting right up until the day that Wrath of the Lich King Classic launches. This buff should provide a great opportunity for everyone who may have fallen behind the leveling curve, or anyone with alts they want to prep for the next adventure to jump in and get caught up to level 70 ahead of the release of Wrath of the Lich King Classic.

This will also be active on Wrath of the Lich King Classic fresh start realms as well, so it should be a great jumpstart for any players who want try to level up quickly during pre-patch and participate in the various Wrath pre-patch events such as the Zombie Plague or special time-limited bosses such as Balzaphon in Stratholme or Tenris Murkblood in Karazhan.

While we aren’t quite ready to announce specific dates around Wrath Classic, we felt it might be helpful to let you know ahead of time that this buff event was coming. We’ll have more to share around Wrath of the Lich King Classic launch plans in the coming weeks.

Thank you!

One of the most common pieces of feedback we’ve received (and observed ourselves in our own adventures) is the concern about pervasive sales of dungeon boosting services in-game. It often overpowers chat with advertisements and makes certain channels hard to use for their intended purpose.

It’s also no secret that the gold from many boosting groups is used for illicit activities such as Real-Money Trading (RMT), as much of the gold that players pay to boosters is then sold for real money back to other players.

Now that we’ve seen the final major content release of Burning Crusade Classic, we will soon adjust the behavior of creatures in most dungeons (including the new dungeons coming in Wrath of the Lich King Classic) to make it significantly more difficult to endlessly snare and kite enemies. Additionally, we will implement a reduction to group XP earned when there is large disparity between player levels in the same group.

We’ve experimented with similar changes to most dungeons on our Season of Mastery servers, and we’ve found these changes to be very effective at reducing the efficiency of boosting groups. We plan to roll out these adjustments to Burning Crusade Classic realms at the same time as the Joyous Journeys XP buff, which should happen sometime in the next several weeks. Stay tuned for more information about that and when you can expect to see these changes hit live servers.

This is also a good opportunity to remind everyone that spamming chat channels with advertisements for boosting services outside of dedicated Trade channels is against the Terms of Service, and you should take every opportunity to report players that you see advertising for boosting services in channels such as General and Looking For Group.

We’re really looking forward to players joining us very soon in the Wrath of the Lich King Classic Beta, and hope to be able to share more about that very very soon as well!

As we all know, there’s an infinite amount of ground to cover on this topic. I’m not sure how much I can say that hasn’t already been said before, but what I can assure you of is that our team is extremely committed to finding good solutions to player concerns that don’t compromise on the things that make Classic loved in the first place.

And speaking of solutions, I’ve come bearing some good news: we are actively developing a brand-new Group Finder UI for Wrath of the Lich King Classic! Here’s a small sneak preview of some of the features we’re aiming to deliver.

• New Look, Modern Code: We’ve rebuilt the UI to be easier to read and more inviting than it was in Burning Crusade Classic. Behind the scenes, we’re using our modern Group Finder code, ensuring stability and performance.
• Roles: We’re introducing roles into the UI in Wrath Classic. Partial groups can broadcast which slots they have open, and individuals can specify whether they’re willing to tank, heal, deal damage, or do multiple of the above. Roles are intended to expedite communication – not stifle gameplay creativity – so for the moment we’re keeping all roles open to all classes.
• Solo Listings and Multiple Activities: We envision this Group Finder as a “bulletin board” where players can list activities they want to do and discover others who want to do the same. To that end, we’re supporting listings from both solo individuals and partially filled groups. And if you can’t decide which dungeon you want to run, that’s okay! You can list yourself for more than one.
• Request Invite and Suggest Invite: To smooth out group formation, we’re adding Request Invite and Suggest Invite features. Just remember: a quick “Hey there” is always preferred over a silent and sudden ninja-invite!
• The Single Source for Your Group Finding Needs: We’re aiming for this Group Finding UI to be a one-stop shop for all your group-finding needs. To that end, we’re reviving an old rule from the original Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King: sending messages in the Looking for Group chat channel will require being listed in the UI.

You might be thinking, “no one likes restrictions”. In an ideal world, each individual player would build their groups using whatever tools they deem best for the job. However, we’ve observed that group finding is a social coordination problem, and there’s value in funneling everyone through the same system. If we can create a single “source” through which all group finding is done, all players will reap the benefits.


We’re aiming to have our new Group Finder deliver an effective, efficient, and enjoyable group finding experience, and we want the help of you and other players in getting there. We’ll have a fully functional test version of the Group Finder available on day 1 of the Wrath of the Lich King beta.

We look forward to hearing your feedback!

Creatures and NPCs

• Fixed an issue where Princess Tess Greymane would not be present in the Hall of Shadows.

Dungeons and Raids

• Sepulcher of the First Ones
  
  • Halondrus
    
    • Fixed several visual issues with the environment disappearing during the encounter.
      
• The Necrotic Wake
  
  • Surgeon Stitchflesh
    
    • Fixed an issue causing Festering Rot to not scale its damage properly when cast by Surgeon Stitchflesh's first Creation.
      
    • Reduced the maximum applications of Festering Rot to 15 on Mythic difficulty.
      
      • Developers' note: Our goal with this change is to address an issue that caused Festering Rot to act inconsistently without inadvertently increasing the difficulty of the encounter.
        

Quests

• The Ilskahorn horn visual should now be removed upon abandoning or completion of “Focusing the Eye.”