Asmongold TV - Vanilla WoW is BACK? | Asmongold Reacts | Asmongold

Episode Date: June 23, 2025

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Vanilla Wow is back, and it's not just hardcore. Again? Yep, they brought it back. They're calling it Classic Classic. Guys, I gotta tell you, I don't think it's a surprise. Classic Wow got really popular at the exact same time that All the War came out. I don't think it's a fucking coincidence. I don't think so. I think it just, I think we all know why that happened.

Over the past few months, much of the talk around classic wow has been surrounding the hardcore scene. Yeah, it sure has. A ton of people have been trying it out and seeing what makes it so popular for themselves. And though we do now have official servers confirmed, their release is still sometime later this summer, leaving much to be discussed as to what will or will not be allowed. But it's not just the hardcore scene that has witnessed a revival on the cloud. I feel like not enough warlocks use a wand. Wand is just so strong with your dots up.

You don't have to worry about manna at all. Classic servers. I feel as though this has very much fallen to the wayside, but regular classic era servers are seeing a huge boom in players. And no, it's not just people semi-a-fking on their bug mounts with thunderfuries in capital cities, though there are certainly a lot of them. It's people coming back for battlegrounds, open-world PVP, raiding, and leveling. Imagine that.

Classic wow is a good game. Who could have ever predicted such a thing? Tirely new. characters. Despite every issue that there is with a server stuck on the last phase of content, with a promise of no further updates, people are willing to come back and hit that new character button and just start over again. It seems clear to me that it's not just hardcore players who are making a home in vanilla once again. And I believe both crowds are after something which cannot be achieved by one singular new server release. Well, the reason why people like

Classic Wow is that it's a living, breathing MMO in a way that no other MMO is. Classic Wow is a game that the leveling experience genuinely matters. Getting really cool gear, everybody can see it. There's no micro-transactions or any kind of bullshit. OSRS?

Yeah, I can't speak to that. I haven't played that enough to like really have an opinion on it. The thing is, even though we have the hardcore servers, there's no transmog, which is great and all. Is it also time for? You can see, and it's so cool, right?

This guy's got the PVP gear. Let's see. This dude right here, those are the tier one shoulders. That's the tier two shoulders for warriors. That axe, I think, is the axe from BWL. That's the tier 2.5 shoulders for shamans. There's the staff from Nefarion. There's the shoulders from Tier 2 for Mage.

There's the fucking, obviously, the 2.5 shoulders for Warrior. with Lionard Helm, and then obviously Bone River's Edge. You've got, of course, the full Dreadnought Warrior with Thunder Fury in the face of death. And so you can easily see what every single thing is, right? And that's awesome. A no changes-ish, 2019 Vanilla Classic Fresh.

In today's video, I'll be checking out the growth of non-hardcore servers, going into why people are choosing to revisit them now, and ultimately why Blizzard should consider more than just the hardcore servers for the good of the game. Let's go back though. Imagine how it was in 2019.

Classic World of Warcraft is finally releasing. You've cleared your entire calendar for two weeks. There is. You have your healthy diet of Doritos and Mountain Dew prepared. You're physically and mentally ready to smash this game. And you are a ripe young age of 28. Ah, to go back to Sim. Oh God, bro.

Was I 28? Oh God, I was 28 when it came out. No, I was 29. I was 29. Yeah, I was 29. I was 28 when the beta came out, though. A couple of times. I guess really none of this should have been a surprise.

Vanilla has been popular seemingly forever now. And even compared to TBC and Raffer the Litch King, it really does offer a totally unique experience. Yeah, it does. Osteeman raids, world buffs, no flying, insane stacking of buffs, question. Joke-ass raids that are so fucking easy. you could do them with your monitor off. Please, can we acknowledge the fact

that's why it was so popular? Because the raids were so fucking easy. ...class balance, PVP ranking, a huge open world, and so much more. You probably heard some of those and recoiled at the thought of going back to it. Others are waiting for a chance

to go back and do them all again. If you can say one thing about vanilla is that it really doesn't try to cater to, to everyone. And if somebody hates something... Well, I think it does cater to everyone. But people find what they want to do inside of the game and they can do that. That's what

makes it good. Even still, it's kind of amazing how many people are going back to these servers. And it's always difficult to know exactly how popular any realm is, given we don't have official numbers from Blizzard. But there are some ways we can estimate it. Even just logging into a server and eyeballing it

is a reasonable starting point. Yeah, sure. I did a walk through Stormwind and Orgram Arbiter. between around 8.30 a.m. to 8.45 on a Wednesday morning. Also, there were no world buffs dropping at this point in time. If I'm making a video about these servers being popular, this is potentially one of the worst times I could have possibly picked to get a view of lots of people being logged in. I mean, this is way more people than you see in a retail wow server.

And those are cross- Realm. And honestly, I couldn't believe how many players were there in Stormwind, Orgramar, leveling zones, or just throughout the world. This was on the final. So somebody says in a fucking, somebody says retail is good. People are just too brain dead for its own good. If they simplified it to this again,

wow could be popping. Yeah. Retail wow is too hard. It's too hard. Like the game's too fucking hard. Like I don't know what else you want me to say. Like, and it might not be too hard.

And again, you maybe are an expert wizard. Okay? You are an expert wizard. you understand the game's nuances, you are good at the game, you care about the game. But can we please fucking acknowledge that this is not the majority of people? It's still way too fucking hard. Round cluster on Europe, by the way.

There isn't even anything weird going on here with people from different time zones being online now. These are the classic era non-hardcore realms in the morning on a weekday. And dare I say it, this looks pretty good to me. I mean, a storming looked like this on a morning, actual classic, I'd be kind of happy with it. And I don't have an active NA account to go and check, but I'm told their most active server cluster is Whitemain, and it's quite a similar story.

Also, in case you are wondering, the PVP clusters are a lot more active. I suppose I should mention this now, but servers on error are linked together. So this will contribute to how many players you are meeting in the world. This happens sometime after error servers were made to boost player encounters within the game. This is different from merging too,

as you'll see players with their own name, then their realm name after. The PVE realms are less active. Yeah, of course. I mean, that's just how it is. Somebody says this, the Old War raids I go to are still four plus hours

and they can't kill full hard modes. People just aren't good at the game. Like, you're not wrong. It is so fucking sad. I have raided in Old War before, and I actually quit the game over it. I don't want to deal with it. It's just, it's not fun.

And that's the same way I feel about retail well. I don't want to raid in Mythic because people are just going to do it wrong. I don't want to do it. That's a waste of time. And like, I don't want to do an easier mode in retail wow to get a shitty piece of gear that's not good. In classic wow, you do an easy raid and you get all the good gear. That's it. You get all the good gear and that's it.

It's that simple. I do older 5x times a week, cleared under two hours, my the exception? Yeah. What do you mean? you think the norm is doing old war five times a week you think that's the norm in general and are all linked together to

be it on EU or an A so you can pick any of them if you want to play on PVEE it doesn't matter the RP realms are not part of any cluster which is why the hardcore players have gone there anyways back over to Firemore I went and had a check on the auction house to see somebody says ICCC is the best difficulty

remember what the remember what you had to do when Ice Crown said or Marigar this is what you had to do Because remember, you didn't actually have to move away from the fire. Everybody would just stack on top underneath the boss. So hit boss and then move away whenever boss does spinny thing. And then after boss does spinny thing, hit boss again. And then whenever the spikes happen, do AEOE and hit spikes.

Death whisper. Kill ads. Don't kill the big ads. Let the range kill the big ads. Then kill the boss. If the boss does the green thing on the ground, get out of the green thing. Then kill the boss. Gunship.

Go AFK until it's dead. Sarfang. Kill the boss. Um, let's see. Festergut. Kill the boss. Um, the fucking rot face. Kill the boss.

If you have the debuff, move out of the raid. How many of the bosses are just kill the boss? Like, it's just so fucking easy. But there were many items being posted and how much they were going for. There were some 30,000 items in total and some pretty reasonable or even cheap prices for things such as arcane crystal, black lotus, elemental earth or fire and so on. I also had a character over on Golomag Horde to check out how things were looking for the Reds. Golomag is on the same cluster as Firemore, by the way. Again, there were plenty of people occupying Orgramar and chilling on top of the bank.

The auction house had nearly 25,000 items and again some pretty. sensible prices. I also flick through some leveling zones on Slashu for both Horde and the Alliance. And as suspected, there are a ton of players just doing some plain old vanilla wow leveling. Starz zones were often capped or near enough showing 50 players. And the later game zones also had a decent number of players. That's crazy to see 42 online players in the wetlands. That is a lot of people leveling.

Gressing too. This, to me, says there's pretty clearly a whole bunch of players who are just after the vanilla experience. They want to be able to do multiple dungeons to trade, to group whenever. And if they die, they just resurrect and go on their merry way. Exactly. Yeah, that's the way that's the way most people want to do it. Retail raids are not hard. People just don't want to read through mechanics or watch quick YouTube videos on how to deal with it. So you're right. You want to know what the guide for, um, uh, fucking patchwork is. Hit the boss. You want the guide for, uh, Gluth, hit the boss and then hit the ads.

But if you don't hit the ads, it's fine. Somebody else will do it. Thaddeus, hit the boss and then move if you get the deep-off. There is nothing that is even remotely close. Because, like, you also, like, I don't want to compare LFR to the classic raids. Because LFR doesn't give the best gear in the game, and the classic raids do. So you should compare heroic or mythic, because that's what gives you. you good stuff.

Get it. It's way more chill than hardcore. You don't have to worry about losing your character or going again. You're happy to get a

dungeon run going without that worry of being grieved. And perhaps biggest of all, there's just a lot more going on at the end game.

There are more raids running and it's less min maxi or gate keepy, whatever you want to call it. Not that these are a bad thing in hardcore

settings if you're raiding and it's death. How many times have we seen this willy clip of him killing Ebenrock on his warlock? I think I've seen this

this video is like seven times. It was delete and you've invested hundreds of hours into your character. You can bet people are going to want to see a certain level of commitment from all the active raiders. But during the regular end game, this isn't really... This guy's a fucking idiot. He shouldn't be here.

He's standing in the wrong spot, so is he. These guys are clowns. They have no idea what they're doing. This guy can't stop doing DPS. He actually thinks that he needs to be there doing DPS all the time, even though he's got fucking Maladath and Thunder Fury on. He's main handing Thunder Fury.

Also, Warcraft Log still maintains a page where the data is actively populated from Error servers. So we can see how many players to this day are choosing to raid on this version of the game. We're going to be looking at passes here, a pass being a single ranking for one boss kill over the past two weeks. You already know you're looking at vanilla when warriors are this far ahead, don't you? Anyways, over... Yeah, and you're looking at retail when Warlocks are.

Just the past two weeks, there's been about 68,000 passes total in Multicorcault. 51,000 in Blackwing Lur, 42,000 in AQ40, and about 74,000 in Nax Ramas. Jesus, that's a lot. Bro, I wouldn't be surprised if that wasn't more than retail. Wow. These are from all passes. Holy shit. Here's another way of putting that.

So if Nax Ramos has 74,000 passes and is a 15 boss raid, that's kind of similar to saying 4,933 people have done Nax Ramos over the past two weeks. That's a lot. Cleared it at least. And if you consider a raid as 40 people, that's about 12340 man raids having done NACS over the past two weeks. Which is not too bad. Yeah, it's really good. People are definitely running the end. Oh shit, the sword dropped.

I never got this. I always want to go back and get this fucking weapon. In content in Vanilla Era, I think the popularity of the raids is pretty normal too. A lot of people are coming back to the game. They want to check it out, so they start off with molten core. There's less people doing Blackwing Lair and AQ40. because, I mean, well, Nax is out. And then Nax is the most popular

because it's the end of the end gaming. It's the most popular because it gives the best gear. People do Nax because it gives the good loot. Fucking duh. Vanilla. In terms of PbP, there was a less action compared to leveling or PVEE and it seemed as though Walsongulch

was the most popular battleground, at least outside of weekend events. This again makes sense. Warsongulch is the smallest battleground and in total only needs 20, plus. players to start. I believe there is cross-faction battlegrounds in Error 2, so this should help game start more regularly. Remember in Classic, there's no experience from Battlegrounds, and Blizzard has recently announced they will be doing a ranked reset. So people in Battlegrounds

when I'm doing this video are the hardcore Battleground enjoyers who are playing just for fun, and not as much for ranking. If I checked prior to this announcement, I'm confident in saying I would be seeing more people PVPing. The leveling zones were plenty busy though, so you should expect world PVP, just don't expect it to be fair. I mean, you already know there's going to be level-capped rogues lurking in strangle thorn veil. It's vanilla open world PVP. It ain't fair. So the question is, why are people making a move back to a no changes, no updates, last phase vanilla server now? Biggest reason? Because it's fucking easy. You get free loot at max level. You can progress completely at your own pace. Everything about the game is figured out. World buffs make the game an even bigger

joke. They also make the world feel alive. Guilds feel like communities. Leveling feels like a game and not just a right of pass. Not like just a fucking checklist to do. Like gearing while your leveling is meaningful. Quests are

dynamic. There's a lot of reasons. Professions matter. Honestly, this is the option that exists if you want to play it. You know on the subreddit and forums, I've already seen a bunch of posts cropping up about TBC too recently. Blizzard should have 100% kept that on error to anticipate future demand.

Maybe it's not too late, but it just feels like a missed opportunity. Vanilla is also a very different experience to Rath. I feel as though I kind of already have my mind made up about Rath as an expansion, despite not being all the way through, and it seems as though many players didn't quite appreciate to what extent it really changed the core fundamentals of the game. Still, I'll wait towards the end before making that video. And as popular as hardcore as...

Rath is, I mean, Rath has the wow token. It's basically retail wow. I mean, that's just what it is. Bean, it's just very different from that standard vanilla wow formula formula. You can't do things such as trading or grouping, not to mention having one life. These can all be deal breakers. And there's also, there's no real content for professions in Rath. Like in B.C. there was a lot of profession content. And in vanilla wow, there was too. What we've just looked at seems to tell a story that whilst there is a demand for hardcore wow, there is equally many players who just want to play your standard vanilla. And while standard vanilla is currently not on the cards, hardcore is.

So here is what might be kind of a hot. No, no, no, no, because Agrin said whenever Sartre interviewed him after that classic wow event, the hardcore wow event, he said that they're planning something else and it's not season of mastery too. So like they're probably planning Classic Plus Take I think people who are after fresh Kind of want hardcore realms to be that fresh experience When in reality

They should be something completely different No trading restrictions on grouping and so on Are all part of what makes hardcore wow What it is It might be different in other games They might have different names for it But it's under this formula The challenge has reached this popularity in the first place

Yes hardcore is a more single player than World of Warcraft is typically. And no, the game was not made to be played like this. This is why we're getting separate realms for it. And there are things that suck about hardcore too, such as queuing for named mobs, enchanting just straight up not being viable to level

due to needing rods from blacksmithing and so on. Do we throw away some of the core aspects of hardcore just to make these things possible again? I don't think you do. What if you had the blacksmithing rods on enchanting vendors where you could trade in some materials for them? That's smart. Yeah, they should probably make

little changes like that, that'd be a good idea. Keeping for name mobs is going to be inviting four random people around you. You all spam a macro, you get the tag, you say thank you, you disband and that is it. It's just not really that great. Why not add additional named mobs for low-level quests that can drop the quest items?

There's gold tooth in Fargo Deep Mine. Hey, let's add silver tooth and bronze tooth. All of them can drop the quest item and three different spawn locations will be more than enough to not create bottlenecks. You may have noticed. I think the bottlenecks are part the content actually.

I don't think that I think the bottlenecks are good. Like everybody says that they're bad, but there's like, it's, it's like a weird thing where the bottleneck makes you feel like the game is popping because there's a lot of people that are trying to do the same thing that you are. For the launch of Rath of the Litch King and Beyond, Blizzard specifically split players up into different zones. Wrath Harbourian Tundra. And by the way, for the classic Wow, hardcore realms,

I think the solution is extremely simple. Just make it to where you have like a, you know, a special title that like you can click a setting whenever you're making your character. And it's like, you know, solo self-found. And it says, you know, like you get a special title. And it's like, you know, your name, the Iron Man or something like that. Howling Fjord, Katawas Hydro, or Vashir, and so on. I mean, this is going to be effort with adding extra marks.

Hobbs are not dating the quest text, so don't expect it to happen or anything, but hey, I think it would fix the problem. It's just by now we've had 2019 Classic Reu can Group and Trade, Season of Mastery, we can Group and Trade. Error, we can Group and Trade. TBC, we can Group and Trade. Raffa the Litch King, we can group and trade. And now we have a server where this might not happen, and it's a problem. I don't know. I think we could try something different and it might not be a bad thing. And yes, of course, there will be hardcore enjoyers who are skipping it at the moment because of the rules. I'm not saying these people don't exist.

It's just you can actively see how many people are going by the rules at the moment. I just, I don't know why you can't just have a setting. Like, I mean, I refuse to acknowledge that Blizzard can't disable trading for certain characters. There's no way they can't do that. If they are not perfect and they won't ever be perfect by the way. And the current rules, by the way, the reason why the current rules are the way they are, is because we don't have official servers. Because the concern was that people would get traded gear and items from players that weren't hardcore.

And how do I know that? It's because if you're playing in a group, like this is obviously the philosophy, is that you can only trade with other hardcore players. Because you can also buy things and use things. Can you use the auction house? I don't know if you can or not in hardcore, but you can like trade items and stuff like that. At 60, yeah. So like that's clearly trading is the intent.

You can't trade in hardcore, but you can trade with other players. There is a saying, don't sacrifice something good for perfect. What we have at the moment is good. It's really good in fact. At 60. But it is clear all the same that the standard vanilla enjoys have been growing alongside those who like hardcore. Why is it only one of them is getting what they want?

Because you won't be able to keep both crowds happy with the same servers. I am sure about that. Do vanilla fans just have? to wait for the next seasonal server later this year instead. Well, I think that's what they should do. Yeah, just wait for the next seasonal server. Like, the people, the, the neckbeards that are playing vanilla while right now, they're not going to go away.

It's not like they're going to be like, okay, I guess I'm just not going to play wow anymore. No, bro. Like, they're going to be playing wow forever. If you make a new wow server, they're going to play it. Be afresh where you can trade, group, all of that stuff. I think we can safely assume that. But who knows what other changes it will have. I mean, imagine the thought of a warrior not doing four times.

the damage of half the classes in the game, who would want to play that? I'm out. I'm out. Or should there just maybe be well, and normal fresh? There are, of course, potential issues, such as splitting the player base for one. We've already got so many iterations

of World of Warcraft, do we really need more? And it creates competition for people's attention in your own game, and that just doesn't seem very sensible. Then again, whatever you do, someone is going to have a problem with it. Overall, I just hope for hardcore servers where you can play launch day,

or after six months and it's fundamentally the same experience and that's going to mean it's different from vanilla i just want to play a new season of mastery that has the promise for more content out of knack after knacks and a few little adjustments that's all i just want that just give me that which will mean it's not for everyone and i think that that is okay also i think the amount of people just taking on plain vanilla are worth noticing too it might not have been as prominent of a rise as hardcore has been, but it's clear that a lot of players want that. That's all for the thoughts today, though. Just a bunch of things I wanted to say about vanilla doing well and the hardcore servers in general. Any thoughts you have about all of this? Do drop it down below. And as always,

thank you all so much for watching and listening in. And I'll see you on the next one very soon. Decent video, this is something that's great. I mean, seeing like more people playing vanilla wow. Like, I, I think it's a... There are certain things about Vanilla Wow that make it special. And I know that some people might not want to acknowledge that or whatever, but I think some things like competition on mobs, world buffs, running to the instance together, those are things that make the game special.

And so I don't want to see them take away world buffs and make the raids way harder. Because that's not why people play classic wow. No, wow is better is because it's generally more immersive. It is. way more immersive, man. It's been, yeah, absolutely. I want some of why Blizzard do a classic launch and expansion with completely different timelines where, like, I'lliden beat Arthus.

Yeah, I don't know if that's ever going to happen. I love the openness of classic. The zones and retail just seem over-designed, so cluttered and too dark. Yeah, I mean, there is something that's like really nice about the simplicity of classic wow. I do think Blizzard's dialed that back a little bit. But yeah, like the openness of the game, it does feel more like a world. and like vanilla wow feels more like a theme park. World buffs are a chore that people even knows unwilling have to do because of how good it is.

I think that world buffs make raids more fun because it's cool to watch somebody kill a boss really fast. I think that yes, it is a chore, absolutely. But if the world buffs aren't a chore, then the raid is. So, you know.