On Monday at 3pm Pacific time the launch of Cataclysm Classic begins… and I am honestly not even sure where I need to be to best experience it.

I mean three years ago… was it really that long ago… with Burning Crusade Classic everybody went to the newly upgraded black gate and waited for our chance to rush through into Outland.  There was a crowd.

Then, with the Wrath Classic launch back in September 2022, we were all on the dock eager to get on the first boat to Northrend.

But with Cataclysm Classic we are getting into the post-Classic era in more ways than just, say, the before/after era of dungeon finder.  We’re now into the era of expansions I didn’t really play much when compared to Wrath.

My memories are pretty vague, but I know we went into Cata back in the day by re-rolling new characters with an eye to experiencing the new world of Azeroth only to find it had been dumbed down to the point of being quite dull compared to our original experiences.  We ended up leaving and didn’t come back until Mists of Pandaria was wrapping up and Warlords of Draenor was warming up.

So, as I said already, I am not even sure where everybody is going to be on Monday, and the three weeks of the pre-patch were not much help.

Though, part of me thinks the pre-patch started as an involuntary beta given how much was broken the day it launched.  I got in there and had to figure out how to spec and play my paladin on day one, only to come back later and find all of our talent points had been refunded because things still needed to be fixed.

And then we had three weeks to do… what?

Was there a Cataclysm launch event or quest chain that I missed?

I mean sure, if you wanted to roll up a goblin or worgen character, you had some runway to get that done.  And I guess there is the new archaeology trade skill to work on… though I always found archaeology dull and somewhat less rewarding than many of the already dull and unrewarding trade skills in the game.  I mean, I guess I could still catch up on that, but I would need to find the motivation.

On the trade front, I was pleased to see inscription and glyphs were actually expanded with Cata.  I totally forgot about that.

Then again, I know inscription will be nerfed into irrelevance eventually… doesn’t Warlords of Draenor pretty much kill all crafting… but for the moment it is pretty good.

I was also a bit pleased to see that we got transmog that was closer to current retail transmog than what we got back in the day.  I mean, I think transmog in retail is fraught and over complicated, but it suck at least 80% less than the original pass at it.

So, with three weeks to kill, the first thing I did, of course, was head to the flight master in Stormwind and spend the 200 gold to get flying in Azeroth.  Best gold spent ever.

Then I spent some time running the Children’s Week quests on multiple characters.  Might as well beef up my companion pet roster in advanced of pet battles in Pandaria… which should be released before the next Children’s Week rolls around.

That done I… poked around and tried to learn my classes a bit.

I am actually somewhat pleased with how the protection paladin plays now, at least solo.  I have no memories about specs after Wrath, mostly because Blizz just got in the habit of throwing everything in the air and shuffling specs after that.  But this time around it worked pretty well.  I am definitely more OP than I was with the Wrath spec.  I base this on the fact that I could never quite solo Chillmaw on that one Argent Tournament quest.  I came close, but could never quite swing it.  I always needed a bit more DPS.  And this kind of bothered me because I have distinct memories of soloing Chillmaw.

Well, after getting into the Cata spec, Chillmaw was soloable.

I guess those memories are more of early Cata than late Wrath.  Maybe?  Anyway, I could go earn 10 champions seals daily, which I am saving up to buy the tournament pets.  Again, gotta fill up that pest roster.

I did also run around and get the achievement for doing the quests in Icecrown.  I was only a few quests shy.

I now just need Storm Peaks and Zul’Drak.  Storm Peaks I am also close on, but Zul’Drak… le sigh.

I did strongly consider starting a new character just to experience some of updated Azeroth… to the point of rolling up a dwarf shaman and getting into the starter area… but then thought better of that.  I have done the whole loremaster of Kalmidor and the Eastern Kingdoms before.  I don’t need to do it again.  Plus I have six characters at level cap already.  Seven isn’t going to make me feel better.  Now I regret spending some champion’s seals on some heirloom gear for him.

I did get ahead of the game on one Cata ritual.  While running around during Children’s Week I got blasted by Deathwing and got the obligatory “stood in the fire” achievement for dying.

So that is out of the way.

Now we have a weekend left before the big unlock and I am not sure what I should do, if anything, to get ready for it.  I’ll probably run the Argent Tournament dailies… and maybe work on finishing up the Storm Peaks.

Wrath of the Lich King Classic is effectively over now.  The Cataclysm Classic pre-patch has been on the servers for two weeks, the initial chaos of that patch has been mostly resolved, and now I’m hanging out, doing a few clean up things in Northrend as I get to learn how the new specs… old specs… new old specs… work for a couple of classes.

Back before Wrath Classic hit, I had put a lot of weight on the idea that THIS was going to be the peak of the classic experience for me.  It wasn’t that we didn’t love vanilla WoW Classic, grindy though it could be, relatively speaking at least, it was just that Northrend lives larger in my memory than any of the expansion.  My head canon is that this is peak WoW for me.

So how did that play out?

On a gut level, I think it made the mark.  I am certainly less inclined to play when I am not engaged, but that was also the case with The Burning Crusade Classic, where we bailed as a group once we were not having fun, which was pretty quickly.  And, in Northrend, once our group had done what it came to do, we ran off and did something else.

The desire to grind out every last thing wasn’t as prevalent.

It may even be that Blizz let the expansion run a bit longer than it should have.  I was on the first boat to Borean Tundra more than 19 months ago.  The thing about the classic experience is that it is also supposed to be a more condensed experience.

Original Wrath ran for 754 days, which was a smidge over two years.

Wrath Classic will close out on May 20th having run for 601 days, which was probably a good 90 days too many for the experience.  Retro servers always run at nearly 2x speed, so running Wrath Classic at 1.25x speed meant people were done before Blizz was ready.

I know, Blizz has to balance a release schedule and doesn’t want one thing to interfere with another and also had its whole Season of Discovery shtick going and there was the possibility, given the way the pre-patch landed initially, that they simply were not ready to go to Cata Classic yet.  Lots of things go into the timing.

But, also, I haven’t played all that much since the new year.  Actually, if you go back, you will see we were playing Season of Discovery for a while even.  Now, we all stayed subscribed, so Blizz won the economic victory, but dead servers and people not playing your game is an issue on its own.

Anyway, we’re now at the end, our group is waking up back in Northrend, taking stock, and getting ready for Cataclysm.

Back to my subjective feelings about Wrath Classic, I think it was both more and less than I expected.

A lot of it is fun and interesting and all the classes I played felt useful and a bit over powered, which I don’t think is a bad thing.  Generally speaking, feeling a bit OP makes me play more aggressively, which means I am often more likely to get in over my head and end up with a fun fight than if I feel I am out of my depth and expect that if i get more than one mob on me that I need to flee.

The zones… I’ve probably done a few of them too many times for there to be more than the joy of competence, the feeling that I know where I am and where I need to go to accomplish my assigned task.  This is not nothing.  One of my favorite zones in LOTRO is the Lone Lands because, after all these years, I know it like the rangers do.  It is a place that makes me feel a part of the story and land I know it so well.

There is also this flat spot in leveling… something accentuated by the fact that when you roll into Borean Tundra at 68, the 68-70 ride is very fast… that makes things feel like they are dragging around 73-75.  Maybe I just don’t like those middle zones.  But once you hit Sholazar Basin things seems to start to pick up and the drive to 80 feels like it goes by more quickly than the previous few levels.

Looking at my achievements… which are now unified across characters since the pre-patch… the only zones I did not get the “did all the quests” update for were Zul’Drak and the Storm Peaks, and I am close on the Storm Peaks.  I might go finish that.  Zul’Drak though… how badly do I want that “Loremaster of Northrend” achievement?

The dungeons were good, and while we got into heroics with our group, none of them were complete push-overs on the first try.  We had to figure things out.  I was also happy enough to see Blizz pushing the envelope with extra hard modes for dungeons, so that there was a challenge for those sharper than us.

I also played a lot of Wintergrasp.  Again, my memories of it are probably a case of rose colored glasses.  I enjoyed it, but it also at times could feel like a solved problem on some rounds, where a core people could show up and drive victory.  But it was fun and chaotic at times and an absolute fountain of honor points.  Our guild message of the day is something like:

How much honor for a shameful defeat? Oh, wow, that’s a lot!

I am interested to be reminded how much Blizz reigned all of that in when it came to Cata.

So, subjectively, here at the far end of Wrath Classic, I am pretty happy with the experience.  There are, and always be, purists stomping their feet about this detail or that, but overall it lived up to my expectations… except for the draw distance thing.  That still irks me and I don’t know why it is such an issue, but it has been there since day one of WoW Classic, so that is hardly just a Wrath issue.

Flipping that around, I was digging for things that might objectively indicate I enjoyed Wrath Classic.  I expect the biggest sign is the fact that I got six characters up to level 80.

I will grant you that I took full advantage of the various points where Blizz turned on the Joyous Journeys xp boost, along with a bit of heirloom gear, and that at least three of those characters were around level 60 at the end of vanilla Classic.  But that is still a pretty good run for me, especially for the rogue, a class I often don’t like, and one that Blizz likes to alternately buff then mess up with spec changes, who was around level 40 when Wrath Classic hit.

There is also the factions in Northrend, at least the ones you encounter on the overland journey.  I did pretty well with them.

On my main, my paladin Wilhelm, I managed to get 10 out of 11 to exalted.

The Wyrmrest Accord… getting faction with them is right in the start of that flat spot for leveling, where I am always trying to get to the next zone, so I fear I do not hang around in Dragonblight very long.  You have to be there long enough to unlock the dailies to get them up to exalted, and I am never quite up to that. [Edit: I went back and got them to revered after writing this post.]

I also did enough of the Argent Tournament to get Wil exalted with all of the alliance home city factions and become the exalted champion of each.

Overall, I feel pretty good about Wrath Classic.  I enjoyed my time going back to Northrend as it was… or as it mostly was… and playing through it fresh with the correct specs and rewards.  My memories of it are not all just filtered through a heavy curtain of nostalgia.  It was some good stuff.

Did it run too long?  Probably.  But it also sounds like they won’t be making that same error with Cataclysm Classic.  So it is on to the new specs and the reborn old world.

I had successfully made my way to Northrend with my rogue, now my sixth character to get into the content of Wrath Classic.  But I was a bit behind on a few of his skill, which meant returning to older content to catch up.

The first was mining.

One of the errors, in my view, of The Burning Crusade was the necessity to have harvesting skills up to 300 before you could use them in Outland… well, except herbalism.  Somehow they saw the light on herbalism, mostly by putting some vanilla era herbs out in Hellfire Peninsula.  But mining… forget about it.  You need 300 mining skill to get fel iron ore, and Chad was sitting at 245.  Not even close.

Fortunately I had done the thorium loop in Winterspring in the past so knew what to do.  I had to pass some rich deposits at first, but soon skilled up enough to get them.  A couple of sessions of that… one can only run in a circle mining for so long… and I had hit the magic number.

Then it was out to Hellfire Peninsula to mine fel iron until I hit 325, then to Zangarmarsh where Adamantite gets thrown into the mix.  I hit 350 quickly enough… my main problem was another person out there flying the same loop for the same reason… and I was on to Borean Tundra because the devs learned their lesson and made cobalt mining require just 350 skill level.

So, problem solved.  Also, Chad’s other harvesting skill was skinning, and that is almost always maxed out… especially after Nagrand and Hemet Nesingwary.

Which brought me to lockpicking.  Having only barely played a rogue in the early days… technically, my first character in the group was a rogue name Blintz, but he was replaced by my paladin when the group caught up to him in levels… lockpicking never really entered into it that much.  I remember doing some leveling up with a bunch of locked boxes that spawned out in Redridge, but I mostly just ignored the skill after that.

And then, at some point, the skill just went away and your lockpicking skill was a function of your level and nobody mentioned it ever again.

But not yet.  Not in Wrath Classic.  There I was still in the era of having to skill that up and I was… way behind in lockpicking.

That picture I took a bit into my efforts.  I was down at 135 when I started.

Where to even go to get that skill leveled up?  Fortunately, when it comes to WoW at least, there is always some site out there that has the answer.

First it was off to Ashenvale to the coast around Blackfathom Deeps where I ran around in a large loop by the naga and the wildlife looking for chests to get to 150.  Then it was off to Angor Fortress in the Badlands for the next segment of training.

I spent a good part of an afternoon there.  The lockboxes upstairs will get you to at least 175, and then you go downstairs and can get past 250.  That is still a lot of locks to pick in a place where I estimate no more than five are active at any moment and you can easily outrun the spawn rate.

I ran that until all the chests were green difficulty before moving on to Searing Gorge, where you have to go into the mines with the Dark Iron dwarves and find their chests to unlock.

That stage also took a while, because chests are scattered about and only a couple seem active at any given moment.  I pushed that until I wasn’t getting skillups because the next suggested location was Blackrock Depths.  So off I went again.

The guide says that there are four locks you can do at the start of the instance.  There are three doors that will give skill ups and then the shadowforge lock that is in one of the first crowded rooms where things can go wrong if you don’t manage your aggro radius.

I pushed Searing Gorge for all it was worth because, while it is easy enough to run in and pick these locks… I did it with no problems and got my skillups… you can only reset an instance 5 times in an hour, so I wanted to get to within 20 skill points of 300… once again, the barried for Outland lockpicking… so I could do it all in one go.

I succeeded in that.  From there it was off to Outland and Zangarmarsh, where there are a bunch of chests along the north of the western side of the swamp.

And then, once those went green in difficulty, it was off to Nagrand and one of the fortresses there that has boxes to pick scattered about.

That was actually where I had to do some work and be careful because, at level 70, I was still in the level range for the mobs around there and couldn’t just one-shot anything that looked at me cross-eyed.

With that I made it to 350.

I also stopped for a minute to slay a few Talbuk so I could get my cooking skill… at 349 in the first screen shot… over the 350 marker so I could start in on recipes in Northrend.

So Chad is all tuned up on lockpicking.  Now it is just the detail of getting him to level 80 at some point before Cataclysm Classic.

I had successfully made my way to Northrend with my rogue, now my sixth character to get into the content of Wrath Classic.  But I was a bit behind on a few of his skill, which meant returning to older content to catch up.

The first was mining.

One of the errors, in my view, of The Burning Crusade was the necessity to have harvesting skills up to 300 before you could use them in Outland… well, except herbalism.  Somehow they saw the light on herbalism, mostly by putting some vanilla era herbs out in Hellfire Peninsula.  But mining… forget about it.  You need 300 mining skill to get fel iron ore, and Chad was sitting at 245.  Not even close.

Fortunately I had done the thorium loop in Winterspring in the past so knew what to do.  I had to pass some rich deposits at first, but soon skilled up enough to get them.  A couple of sessions of that… one can only run in a circle mining for so long… and I had hit the magic number.

Then it was out to Hellfire Peninsula to mine fel iron until I hit 325, then to Zangarmarsh where Adamantite gets thrown into the mix.  I hit 350 quickly enough… my main problem was another person out there flying the same loop for the same reason… and I was on to Borean Tundra because the devs learned their lesson and made cobalt mining require just 350 skill level.

So, problem solved.  Also, Chad’s other harvesting skill was skinning, and that is almost always maxed out… especially after Nagrand and Hemet Nesingwary.

Which brought me to lockpicking.  Having only barely played a rogue in the early days… technically, my first character in the group was a rogue name Blintz, but he was replaced by my paladin when the group caught up to him in levels… lockpicking never really entered into it that much.  I remember doing some leveling up with a bunch of locked boxes that spawned out in Redridge, but I mostly just ignored the skill after that.

And then, at some point, the skill just went away and your lockpicking skill was a function of your level and nobody mentioned it ever again.

But not yet.  Not in Wrath Classic.  There I was still in the era of having to skill that up and I was… way behind in lockpicking.

That picture I took a bit into my efforts.  I was down at 135 when I started.

Where to even go to get that skill leveled up?  Fortunately, when it comes to WoW at least, there is always some site out there that has the answer.

First it was off to Ashenvale to the coast around Blackfathom Deeps where I ran around in a large loop by the naga and the wildlife looking for chests to get to 150.  Then it was off to Angor Fortress in the Badlands for the next segment of training.

I spent a good part of an afternoon there.  The lockboxes upstairs will get you to at least 175, and then you go downstairs and can get past 250.  That is still a lot of locks to pick in a place where I estimate no more than five are active at any moment and you can easily outrun the spawn rate.

I ran that until all the chests were green difficulty before moving on to Searing Gorge, where you have to go into the mines with the Dark Iron dwarves and find their chests to unlock.

That stage also took a while, because chests are scattered about and only a couple seem active at any given moment.  I pushed that until I wasn’t getting skillups because the next suggested location was Blackrock Depths.  So off I went again.

The guide says that there are four locks you can do at the start of the instance.  There are three doors that will give skill ups and then the shadowforge lock that is in one of the first crowded rooms where things can go wrong if you don’t manage your aggro radius.

I pushed Searing Gorge for all it was worth because, while it is easy enough to run in and pick these locks… I did it with no problems and got my skillups… you can only reset an instance 5 times in an hour, so I wanted to get to within 20 skill points of 300… once again, the barried for Outland lockpicking… so I could do it all in one go.

I succeeded in that.  From there it was off to Outland and Zangarmarsh, where there are a bunch of chests along the north of the western side of the swamp.

And then, once those went green in difficulty, it was off to Nagrand and one of the fortresses there that has boxes to pick scattered about.

That was actually where I had to do some work and be careful because, at level 70, I was still in the level range for the mobs around there and couldn’t just one-shot anything that looked at me cross-eyed.

With that I made it to 350.

I also stopped for a minute to slay a few Talbuk so I could get my cooking skill… at 349 in the first screen shot… over the 350 marker so I could start in on recipes in Northrend.

So Chad is all tuned up on lockpicking.  Now it is just the detail of getting him to level 80 at some point before Cataclysm Classic.