World of Warcraft: Classic didn’t release with every feature that players remember from Vanilla – in fact, it was missing the vast majority of them. Instead, Blizzard has been spacing out the continent in phases, allowing for there to be true progression. This also helps to stop players from feeling overwhelmed, as well as to stop content from being obsolete immediately.
The next patch coming up in April will be giving us quite a bit of content to work through. Beginning with the player-vs-player content, we have one of the earliest battlegrounds returning again with Arathi Basin.
Arathi Basin, if you aren’t familiar, is a 15v15 PvP scenario with five territories – farm, lumber mill, stables, mine, and blacksmith. Controlling these gives your faction points, working in a king-of-the-hill type format as your faction fights to keep dominance over a point. The addition of Arathi Basin also adds in the reputations of the League of Arathor and Defilers factions for Alliance and Horde respectively, adding in new rewards.
Towards the PvE format, we have the next endgame raid in the ancient troll city of Zul’Gurub. Originally added to Vanilla in patch 1.7, the raid consists of ten different bosses with Hakkar, the Soulflayer leading up the pack. Players can earn a variety of powerful items in here, as well as rare mounts and reputation with the Zandalar tribe.
The third addition is the Green dragon world bosses, who appear at the handful of portals to the Emerald Dream scattered throughout the world. These four dragons – Emeriss, Lethon, Taerar, and Ysondre – spawn within Feralas, Duskwood, Hinterlands, and Ashenvale. Killing them gives a chance to receive some great PvE gear with nature resistance, which’ll give you a great hand when you want to tackle a few of the endgame challenges.
These additions are all already available on the Public Test Realm, available for players to go ahead and test. Monumentally, this also marks the first time that the WoW Classic PR has been opened for players, allowing for some useful feedback for developers while the players get to run the new content to prepare for their endgame plans at launch.
Phase Four is going to be released in two different stages. Arathi Basin will open on all realms on the week of March 10th, with the Battleground Holidays system joining in too. Zul’Gurub and the Dragons of Nightmare will be joining sometime in April, though no exact time has been given as of yet.
