Season of Mastery Vs Classic WoW - What Is The Difference Between Original WoW Classic And SoM

Season of Mastery Vs Classic WoW - What Is The Difference Between Original WoW Classic And SoM

11/20/2021 3:48:32 PM

Season of Mastery is here, for the last few weeks as this new iteration of Classic is getting closer and closer, more and more people are asking what exactly is different in Classic Season of Mastery from the Classic WoW we played in 2019. And that’s a totally legitimate question for people who have been following this project since it was announced a couple of months ago up until now, the changes are clear, but for someone who just learned about this, not so much. And to be fair, Season of Mastery in week 1 of the beta was arguably a completely different game from what it is now a couple of days before release, and if you haven’t been following all along, there are some things you have missed. So today we’ll go through not every little niche aspect that’s different in Season of Mastery from Classic WoW. Let's get into what’s different between SoM and Classic WoW.

What Is Difference Between SoM and WoW Classic

6 Differences In Season of Mastery Vs Classic WoW – Original WoW Classic Vs SoM

1. Design Philosophy

What’s most important, the big motto, the big design philosophy rule that the developers are following when it comes to Season of Mastery. For Classic WoW, the main design intent was to provide a faithful recreation of Vanilla wow. For Season of Mastery, it’s quite different, while the original goal with Classic WoW was to bring it exactly how it was, with all the good and bad things that come with that, the intent for Season of Mastery is to offer quote a Faster Progression and More Challenging Content, Classic WoW was hashtag no changes, Season of Mastery is hashtag slightly more changes. So what this means in practice exactly is that while Classic WoW lasted two years, Season of Mastery will only last 12 months, Classic had 6 phases and so will SoM, however, each phase will only have about two months of a lifetime before the next one releases, in general, this means about one new raid every 4 months if we don’t count Zul’Gurub, and well actually only 2 months between Ahn’Qiraj and Naxxramas, but that’s still quite far in the future.

2. Different Leveling

So all the way from the beginning, the leveling experience is less challenging than it was in Classic WoW. Not really the combat and the quests themselves, those don’t change, pulling a group of 3+ mobs is still gonna mean a guaranteed death, but leveling itself is faster, quests give 40% more XP, and dungeon and elite quests give even more than that, killing mobs still give the same amount of XP. So questing is now king and mob grinding is a thing of the past. Also, and this is quite recent news because leveling is so much faster now, Blizzard also made getting your mount at level 40 significantly cheaper. Now getting a mount only costs 45 gold in total with training and mount cost included, as opposed to 100 gold in Classic. Also, making Classic WoW gold while leveling, or even at max level for the matter is gonna be easier too, herbs and mining veins around the world are more abundant, and on top of giving herbs and ores. They also give elemental fire, earth, water and so on, very valuable reagents that will give provide you with more gold while leveling, which obviously means an easier leveling journey.

After the Season of Mastery servers are taken down, your characters aren’t just gonna be lost forever, you can save them permanently on the Classic Era servers and play them at any point, which means that for all intent and purposes if you want to play Vanilla, doing it on Season of Mastery instead of Classic Era is gonna be better in all aspects.

3. Content Plan

Anyways, after you’re done with leveling and you reach level 60, in Season of Mastery unlike in Classic WoW originally, there’s gonna be a ton of content available for you to do from the get-go, so basically any system that was added outside raiding to Classic throughout its lifespan will be available from the start of Season of Mastery, this means Dire Maul, the tier 0.5 sets, all the battlegrounds, ranking in PvP is gonna be faster too, the Silithus dukes, the world pvp objectives, reputation vendors. Just a plethora of things to do from the get-go as you reach level 60. So everything we mentioned makes Season of Mastery easier and very much not more challenging than Classic WoW.

4. Raid Mechanics

In Classic WoW, raiding was to put it mildly, very easy, especially the early raids like Molten Core or BWL, and there are a few different reasons for that like World buffs, the talents trees from the last patch being at launch, items not being itemized as they were originally and just players having 15 years of experience in World of Warcraft in general. Season of Mastery wants to fix that, they’re bringing a long list of changes to every encounter in Molten Core and Onyxia’s Lair so far, bringing a bunch of new mechanics to every boss to make raiding in line in terms of difficulty with what it is nowadays in the modern version of the game.

Lucifron has 4 adds instead of two, Magmadar summoning two core hounds every minute of the fight, Baron Geddon placing Living bomb on three players instead of one, Shazzrah leaving copies of himself after blinking which will constantly faster Arcane Explosion, Ragnaros submerging at 50%, Onyxia summoning adds all throughout the encounter, and much much more, this was just a snippet of the long list of mechanics brought to each fight in Molten Core and Onyxia, and there’s gonna be much more obviously in BWL and further.

Those new mechanics and the fact that each one of those bosses has double their normal HP now makes raiding significantly more challenging, and that’s exactly where the difficulty of Season of Mastery resides. Those are the direct raid changes, but there are some things that make raiding different in their own way, like the removal of world buffs.

5. Class Changes

Speaking of classes, when it comes to class design, Blizzard has been clear that there will be next to no changes to any class in Season of Mastery, they want people to play the classes that they are familiar playing for this season, this both implies that Blizzard is planning more seasons for Classic. And also that we should see class changes as early as next season hopefully, fingers crossed. And then of course there’s a bunch of other small changes to Season of Mastery like the addition of the LFG tool that we have in Burning Crusade. This thing is barely ever used in TBC and maybe this will change in Classic, it’s a non-intuitive and non-effective tool for finding groups and probably everyone will stick to the Looking for Group channel, but I guess it’s there as one additional place to sign up for if you’re looking to do a dungeon or raid.

6. Boosting & Botting

Boosting is also a thing of the past in SoM, Blizzard was very adamant about that, they don’t want 4 people to just sit AFK at the entrance of a dungeon and get a bunch of XP while a high-level mage is doing all the work for them, and I think everyone can agree with that, so not only is Blizzard making it so that people grouped with a way higher level player than them will receive way less XP, but they also made it so that mobs in a bunch of dungeons will be way more resilient to slows, and snares and whatnot, good riddance boosting. And finally, Blizzard is kinda-sorta doing something about botting, their first change so far is that in BRD, those mobs around the arena that botters used to pickpocket all the time will be significantly less profitable now, after you pickpocket 4 or 5 of them you’ll receive a debuff and you’ll no longer be able to do that, forcing you to reset and thus waste time and thus get locked way faster.

Those are the main big differences between the original Classic WoW and Season of Mastery, the big motto of this season which is faster progression and more challenging content only really applies to raiding, when it comes to the rest of the content, everything is easier and more laid out.