WoW Classic Season Of Mastery Will Bring More Changes To The Old-School MMO

World of Warcraft Classic will soon receive seasonal servers, and when they arrive, they will be bringing some significant changes to Blizzard’s old-school MMORPG.

The first season of WoW Classic is being dubbed the Season of Mastery, and it features a number of changes, outlined by Blizzard in a new blog post. Chief among those changes is faster leveling. Season of Mastery servers will reward more experience points for quests turn-ins, making it more comparable to the Burning Crusade Classic version of the game.

WoW Classic Season of Mastery will also be more difficult. Players ploughed through WoW Classic’s content originally, after more than a decade of experience and the fact that WoW Classic ran on a late-game patch of original WoW made many raid encounters trivial.

Blizzard will be buffing the health of many raid bosses and restoring removed mechanics to make raids more challenging as a result, while also removing the boss debuff limit of 16. That means more classes will be able to use more of their abilities on bosses, which should widen the scope of what classes and specializations can be brought to end-game content. Powerful world buffs that greatly enhance player-power will also be unusable in raids.

WoW Classic Season of Mastery’s content will roll out faster than that of WoW Classic proper. Rather than three or four month phases like in WoW Classic, content will be released roughly every two months instead. The game’s PvP Honor system and battlegrounds will also be available at launch, rather than being released in phases 3 and 4 in WoW Classic.

Due to the larger realm populations on WoW Classic servers, Season of Mastery will see more mining and herbalism nodes added to the game world to compensate. Meeting stones outside of dungeons will also be converted into summoning stones.

WoW Classic servers turned into ghost towns overnight following the release of Burning Crusade Classic, which required players to choose between staying in Azeroth or moving forward into the game’s first expansion. Players could pay $15 to keep a copy of a character in both versions of the game. Season of Mastery should bring back some of those dedicated players who were uninterested in Burning Crusade but also want a new experience.

Blizzard isn’t saying exactly when Season of Mastery will start, but new servers with the changes will be playable in open beta form on the game’s public test realm starting October 5. New WoW Classic servers come as Blizzard continues to deal with the fallout from multiple lawsuits and investigations alleging widespread harassment and discrimination towards women at Activision Blizzard.