Blizzard’s new hardcore World of Warcraft servers have been really interesting to play on for the last 2 weeks. This server is classic wow but with the twist that characters can’t come back to life. Because it is classic wow, a game that is really well understood and as expected, a hundred videos and blog posts popped up about what to do and which route is best and what classes you should play. 

… and almost all of those have been proven to be completely wrong. Why? Why is advice about a game from 2004 wrong? Is nearly 20 years and millions of nerds not enough to understand it? 

So in this case the issue is clear: people misunderstand the problem. Almost all of that advice was based on how quick you can get to level 60 or what class was the best at level 60. Currently, the average character dies at level 13. This completely changes the dynamics of the game. 

Turns out the end game is not the hardest part of wow, it is surviving the early levels. And this makes a lot of sense. Characters at level 60 have a large and well rounded set of skills to deal with a range of situations. This is something that content makers know and spend a lot of time talking about those classes in the level 60 context as the end game is the part they play regularly. But those skills are slowly given out as you level up. It doesn’t matter if a hunter has the best survival skill in the game if they don’t get that skill until level 30. 79% of the hunters die before level 30 and thus will never see that skill. In fact, most hunters never see their pet… which is what the entire class is built around. 

The second great mistake is all the leveling guides. These are all built around efficiency of time to xp… but in hardcore they really need to focus on risk mitigation. Quests are designed to push you to the next zone or go fight a deadly monster… which is the least safe way to play. Picking a spot with the most escape routes and steadily but quickly killing enemies a few levels lower than you gives you the most money and most xp in the safest way. This is an MMORPG where the quests are bad. In many ways this is a return to the old everquest style of grinding out levels against random enemies. 

Now Blizzard made very little changes to the game itself. In fact, they were so lazy they left in the resurrection spells but just disabled their effect. The one thing that has been added in is an announcement system via add-ons. If someone dies in your guild, you learn who, at what level, and what killed them. Generally this is followed by lots of “F” in the chat to show respect. But this also really brings the guild together in an odd way. Everyone learns to avoid certain areas. Everyone shares the pain when a higher level player dies. In a social game, this does really change how the game feels. 

This design also forces you to ask yourself “what is powerful in this game?’. And in this case it is not the traditional dps meter (overall offense) or even best tank/healing abilities. It is the pairing of the panic button abilities that let you stay alive just 3 more seconds to run away and awareness by the player to know they need to run away. This forces much of the traditional wisdom out the door. 

For example, Paladins are slow levelers so everyone on classic goes Retribution spec to get just a bit more damage on a normal server. But by doing so, you skip past some of the Paladin’s best survival mechanisms. Turns out to play well in hardcore, you have to unlearn much of what you did originally because the priority is risk mitigation now. 

This also leads us to an important note. The best class in the game… maybe a profession. At low levels, the target dummy from engineering is an amazingly strong panic button ability. In fact it is better than what most classes have at this level. And because there are so many low level characters starting over again there are plenty of cheap materials on the auction house for you. At level 40, the gnomish invisibility device gives you 10 seconds of invisibility, which is one of the strongest survival options in the game. Alchemists get a similar potion that doesn’t require the profession, so keep an eye out. These two options are better than what most classes get for the whole of the game.