---
title: 'BIG Changes Coming to Hardcore in WoW Forever'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=BoHfpjVV4Zo'
video_id: 'BoHfpjVV4Zo'
date: 2026-09-15
duration_sec: 2174
channel: 'Xaryu'
---

# BIG Changes Coming to Hardcore in WoW Forever

> Source: [BIG Changes Coming to Hardcore in WoW Forever](https://youtube.com/watch?v=BoHfpjVV4Zo)

## Summary

In this panel discussion, Blizzard developers Nora Mills, Chris Deerhut, and Josh Greenfield trace the evolution of World of Warcraft Classic Hardcore from a community-driven idea to an official game mode. They share behind-the-scenes stories, design challenges, and the emotional impact of the hardcore community, while also teasing new features coming to WoW Forever Hardcore.

### Key Points

- **Introduction to the Panel** [00:00] — Nora Mills, lead software engineer on WoW Forever and Classic Team, introduces the panel with Chris Deerhut (principal game designer) and Josh Greenfield (senior game designer). The format is laid back and unscripted.
- **Defining Hardcore in WoW** [01:35] — Hardcore in WoW Classic means if your character dies, it's gone forever. This is inspired by Diablo 2's hardcore mode, but adapted for an MMO where community and cooperation become central.
- **Origins: From Community to Official** [03:41] — The hardcore concept started with community one-life challenges. Blizzard first supported it in Season of Mastery with the 'Soul of Iron' buff, created by designer Tony Trejo, which gave a buff that was lost on death.
- **Growth and Metrics** [06:14] — Josh tracked daily peak concurrency on the Bloodsail Buccaneers RP realm, which grew from 150-200 players to 1,500 after the holiday break, convincing the team to pitch the idea to leadership.
- **Prototype and Green Light** [08:48] — After initial lukewarm reception, engineer Chase McGuire built a prototype in two weeks. Executive producer Holly Longdale gave the green light after seeing it, leading to the official launch.
- **Community Collaboration** [10:01] — The team engaged with hardcore community leaders like Tactics, Only Black Smoke, Winky, Cargaz, and Sars, iterating on design ideas. The official announcement was made at the Hardcore All-Stars event.
- **Design Implications** [12:39] — Implementing hardcore required addressing many edge cases, such as guild leadership transfer on death, UI warnings for world refreshes, and allowing players to transfer to normal realms after death.
- **Launch Reception and Community** [16:20] — The launch exceeded expectations. Hardcore fostered a unique cooperative community where players protect each other, making it the best social experience in WoW history according to Chris.
- **WoW Forever Hardcore Features** [21:04] — New features include over 600 new crafting recipes, a camping system for buffs, improved itemization, and a warning UI for world refreshes to prevent unfair deaths.
- **Death Transfers and Legacy System** [27:42] — After death, players can now transfer to PvE, PvP, or RP realms. The legacy system grants points for reaching level 25, providing permanent perks that make subsequent runs easier, similar to roguelite games.
- **Future Content and Teases** [31:22] — WoW Forever will add content at all level ranges, offering new mastery opportunities. A dedicated Mak'gora arena space is teased for a future update.

### Conclusion

WoW Classic Hardcore succeeded because of strong community collaboration and a design that emphasizes cooperation and meaningful stakes. With WoW Forever, the team is committed to expanding the mode with new content and systems that preserve its core appeal.

## Transcript

Hello! Hi! Welcome to the past, present, and future of hardcore. My name is Nora Mills. I'm a lead software engineer on WoW Forever and of course the Classic Team.
Joining me today is these two awesome dudes. Chris Deerhut, principal game designer and honestly a guy who knows just about everything there is to know about World of Warcraft.
It is true. That's true. Very true. Very true. And also, none other than Adrend, Josh Greenfield.
I didn't even get to his title yet. Senior Game Designer. Wow. So, the format of this panel is very laid back. This is honestly not scripted.
I just wrote down a bunch of bullet points to make sure I pulled the right information out of these two guys. Basically, we're going to talk about how hardcore went from really community-driven idea, concept,
to something our team kind of like got in there and, you know, started saying, hey, you know, we're interested in maybe, you know, talking about this thing and working with the community toward an eventual pitch. and then that launch moment, how it was received
and how our team even kind of received it and reacted to it. And then finally, we're going to maybe share a little bit of what to expect in WoW Forever Hardcore.
So, yeah, to kick things off, for anybody who hasn't played hardcore or who isn't familiar with the concept as it relates to World of Warcraft, you might be wondering, like, all right, does hardcore just mean,
I don't know, they crank up the game difficulty, everything has a lot of health, everything hits really hard. What does it mean for World of Warcraft? If you die, you die. So to pick things up, why don't you explain to the audience, what
is hardcore? So hardcore is a really kind of overloaded term in gaming these days, especially in World of Warcraft, because it means you're doing, you know, Mythic Raider, Mythic Progression, High End Arena
like we just witnessed here. No, it's even harder. Harder than all that. But that's really not what hardcore is about in World of Warcraft Classic, hardcore comes back to something a little further back in Blizzard's history
when they first launched Diablo 2. It had a new mode where you could choose to go to hardcore instead of normal mode. And when your character died, that was it. They're dead.
You can't play them anymore. They're gone. Start over. And I remember back then when that came out, I had some friends that really liked to play hardcore and I kind of teased them about it, Like, someone's going to call you in the middle of the night when you're playing. Boop.
Offline. You're dead. Right. But WoW Hardcore ended up being a very, very different thing than that. It was inspired by what the community did, the add-ons you built, and the ideas that came from you,
the influencers and streamers, and turned into something really great. Yeah. Awesome. I really love the story of, honestly, how it came from the community and then turned into a kind of a collaboration between our team and the community. As you must have heard on our other panels, we are very interested in working with y'all to make this thing the best thing it can be.
And so we really look forward to collaborating with our players for hardcore and also into the future, forever. So for those who don't know, Josh was really at the forefront of a lot of our conversations in the very beginning with players.
My name is Josh. I thought she was talking about me first. I was like, whoa, what? Why don't you explain how did this whole thing start? Where did it all begin? Take us back to the beginning. Well, it's a bit of a long story, so I'll try not to bore everybody.
But essentially, kind of the way it started, I mean, it started when 2019 Classics started. And even before that, there's always been groups of people who want to do, like, the one-life challenge, where you have one shot at leveling a character to 60 without dying.
for us where we really got involved in it was in our season of mastery server so season of mastery was a uh essentially a special rule set fresh vanilla wow realm that we spun up in uh 2022
um or 2021 excuse me uh and uh whenever we announced it you know everyone was there was a lot of people that were really excited to kind of do fresh vanilla again and the hardcore community
self-organized an event called the Road to Ragnarok. Exactly. And, you know, by the time we kind of saw information about that,
it was a couple months before we were going to launch, but we were kind of locking down the build. We were, like, getting ready to be done with Season of Mastery or at least getting ready to ship it. But we were like, man, that is really cool. Like, that would be super fun to support in some way,
but we didn't have very much time left. And ultimately, there was one of our designers on the team, Tony Trejo, who is now an encounter designer on World of Warcraft. He does a great job.
He was like, guys, I think I can slam something in to just give a little wink and a nod to the community on this. And so he created a system called the Soul of Iron, which Soul of Iron is pretty simple. You go and talk to an NPC in town,
and they'll give you a buff that says you've never known defeat, and then obviously if you die, you lose it. Honestly, that was over cool. How long was that? We put that in. We put the server out. And, you know, Road to Ragnaros was a great success.
A lot of people had a lot of fun with it. You know, a bunch of groups made it to 60. They got through Molten Core with 40 other friends who made it to 60 without dying. And they killed Ragnaros. And so we just had so much fun with that, not just kind of like watching it,
but also playing. And a lot of us leveled through that with them. And so it always kind of stuck with us. so fast forward to about a year later we had just launched Wrath of a Lich King and the hardcore
community had kind of spun down on Season of Mastery and they ended up kind of setting up shop on one of our era realms on an RP realm called Blood Cell Buccaneers big shout out to
Blood Cell and at this point they had gotten very sophisticated, Nora mentioned the add-on and And all of the, it kind of kept you honest. It talked to each other. It gave you a death notification in chat.
It was really, really cool. And that's when a lot of us started kind of going hard at it. I know, Nora, I know you went really hard at it. You know, I leveled a bunch of characters, or, well, tried to anyway.
But around that time, we just were like, you know what? This needs to be a real thing. We need to make this a real thing. And so I was a producer at the time, and so I spent a lot of time kind of looking at metrics and numbers and stuff like that as part of my kind of job.
And I started keeping track of what we call like the daily peak concurrency, which is essentially the high watermark each day of how many people are online on average.
And when I first started tracking this, it was probably 150 to 200 people online at once on any given day, which isn't much, but it was a couple of pretty full guilds worth of people that were doing it.
So week over week, I'm tracking this, and this is like toward the end of the year in 2022. Yeah, 2022. too. And once we got close to our holiday break, it had gone from like 200, 350, 500,
1,000. And it was like getting really close to 1,000. And so we went on our holiday break, came back from the break, and it was like 1,500. It had jumped in a week that much. And it's like, this is real. We need to do something with this. And so we kind of put
our heads together. We put together a pitch. And we took it to the kind of upper blizzard leadership and said, hey, we'd really like to do this. Here's kind of the graph, you know, the really fancy looking spiky graph.
And I kind of want to say initially they were a little lukewarm on it. You know, it was like, I don't know, guys. It takes a long time to level and wow. It seems a little risky.
I don't know. Maybe hardcore is not that good of an idea. Trust me, it will be cool. Trust me. Trust me, bro, kind of thing. But so Holly Longdale was our executive producer, and she was probably like 60 or 70 percent sold on it.
And she's like, Josh, I got to go on a vacation. I'll be gone for two weeks. Let me think about it. Let me think about it. And so I'm like, OK. I walked out of it. I was a little despondent. But so Holly used to refer to our team as Team Fingerguns you know And so we went and we talked to one of our engineers Chase McGuire
who ended up doing a lot of the implementation for the final launch version. And we're like, hey, you think you can maybe put together a prototype in two weeks? And he's like, yeah, sure, let's do it. And so, we fingergunned the prototype together in about two weeks.
And, I mean, it wasn't ship ready, but it was hardcore. you died, you stayed dead, you couldn't use reg, you couldn't use onks, you know, stuff like that. And so she comes back from her vacation, she's like, alright, let's talk about this thing. And it's like, well,
we kind of already built it. Here it is. And she kind of did the Jean-Luc face palm, like, oh, yeah, alright, cool, let's do it, let's do it. And that was the green light. And so we were
off to the races at that point. And as soon as we had got the story right, we kind of immediately went and engaged with the community. We had already been, I've been in a Discord chat
for a long time with some people who were really at the spearhead of the kind of hardcore community. I'm talking about people like Tactics, Only Black Smoke, Winky, Cargaz, Sars, you know, to get you guys like that.
Yeah, good shout out there. I really like this way of playing. And, you know, I was like, I kind of had to be a little coy with them. I'm like, well, you know, if we were to do this, like, you know, people kite Tiramis the Devourer
a storm wind. How would we, you know, maybe here's our idea for this. Like, what do you think of that? And they're like, yeah, that's pretty cool, I guess. And, you know, they'd give us feedback and we'd kind of, you know, iterate on that and stuff. And so
we got, you know, we knew we were going to launch it. We figured out what our release date was. It was going to be in August and we needed to announce it. And around the time this was all going, something that I think kind of helped us push over the edge was there was
an event called the Hardcore All-Stars that was happening. You know, shout out to anybody who participated in that or watched it. you know, and it was about to have its finale.
And a lot of the same people who were in that chat with us were working on that and were just like, hey, could it be cool if we just, like, went on there real quick and just said something? And they're like, gee, I wonder what you're going to say.
And, you know, so it was kind of a not very well kept secret, I guess. But so, yeah, they were gracious enough to let us go on to the show, and we announced WoW Classic Hardcore was coming.
And I got to say, that was kind of like the highlight of my time. I've been at Blizzard for 17 years, and that was a pretty big moment to be able to get on and go on there and do that. But, you know, ultimately this is a thing that was by you guys and for you guys.
Like, we just kind of were along for the ride. And it's one of the most special things I think I've worked on at Blizzard. um there's in a lot of ways i feel like wow hardcore is the purest way to play vanilla wow
i love it man i love it absolutely yeah so good man it's so true it's so true we can never go back to the where we were in our lives in 2004 2006 or whatever when we started
playing wow but and it's hard for us to turn our brains off as gamers you know what i mean but this is one of those things that it, like, forces you to play like you played back then, like you were clueless.
And you are clueless. You do have clueless now, but it still just forces you to slow down. And super special. So, anyway, that's the story. What are some of the design implications of implementing hardcore in a game that wasn't
originally, like, designed for it, right? Like, those things had to come up. Like, how did that kind of come up? How did we, you know, approach those problems? Yeah, I mean, a lot of times it's just like, how does it work?
What are the logistics of doing certain things? Like, obviously, it's a really big game. And even those of us who have worked on WoW for 15 plus years, there's things about the game that we even sometimes kind of forget.
And so we had to do a lot of testing, like remember all those little things that would kill you and what weren't fair and try and create solutions for them. And also sometimes make a difficult decision on what not to do.
It's like Velostraz. It's like, well, good luck. Figure it out. And, you know, people did figure it out. Oh, yeah, that's a good example. In the middle of it. Main portal. It's a lot of, it's just a lot of looking at the game top down and trying to understand
what needs to happen to reinforce it for this style of play. And also UI and things like that. Like guilds. Like what happens when your guild leader dies? You know? So, like, we have to communicate that, hey, you need to hand over your guild to somebody else.
You're dead. Stuff like that. And also, like, the considerations for, this isn't Diablo, right? This isn't, like, your character is done and gets deleted. Like, letting you go to the normal servers, the normal era realms after you die is something that,
do you think is a great kind of middle ground for, like, oh, man, I spent 200 hours playing this character. Like, it's not because it was on a server. I love it. You can do that, yeah. You're done with the hardware. You can go over to, you know. one of the normal realms that he's like.
Right. Awesome. So hardcore was something that the community believed in, we believed in, and for the first time ever we were about to ship official hardcore realms. And that was, you know, I mean, anytime you ship a new product,
well, forever, we, you know, there's a certain amount of, like, nervousness, right? There's this anticipation. but we, I don't think that, well, I don't know if our team was fully prepared
for what that launch moment would be like. We actually have a clip from a couple of players who would like to share some of what their experience was like playing the hardcore. I don't know if my friend backstage could put the clip up on the fancy screen.
The red X-Pick? You're just saying it's a good idea. I'm a kuzu hole, I wish I could move my camera, let me see. Let me see if I can figure this out.
I can move my camera but I won't be able to move that.
Can I even kill two steering wheels? I'm gonna kill him. I'm gonna use the health pot. Come on! I can't- Come on! Come on! Are you kidding me?
Are you kidding me? Come on! Ezreal's gone! Oh my gosh. What does hardcore mean to me? It's the closest thing you can get to playing the game back in 2004.
hardcore forces you to go slow, enjoy the process, not just go, go, go, do all your chores and log off, but let me just sit here and game and build up my character. And I love that.
So what did you guys think? How did the launch live up to your expectations? Like, did you expect it to be this big? I was really surprised by one thing about hardcore. I talked to her earlier about how I kind of didn't take it seriously.
Like, you're just going to die. We didn't get disconnected on the phone whatsoever. And it ended up being a very, very different thing because World of Warcraft, unlike Diablo, is an MMO.
And you don't just play it by yourself. You play it with your friends. You don't go in a cave by yourself. Remember, cave equals grave. You want to go with other people. So when that moment happens and you get disconnected,
and Nora's disconnected, somebody like Josh and I, we would hang around and protect her until she goes offline to keep her alive. So the experience changed a lot because now people are defending on each other. It's the world wants to kill you,
and it's you and your friends and new strangers that are now your friends against the world. So you're working together in cooperative ways which really don't happen in all of World of Warcraft.
And I think it results in hardcore having the very best community and social experience in all of World of Warcraft in all of our history. Yeah, that's right. That is right. It's so true.
It's so true. Yes. Well, as Chris mentioned, the world is out to kill you, and that's not just players
who are losing their characters in hardcore. As a matter of fact, some of our beloved team members had moments of their own. I don know if my friend backstage can roll the special clip I have provided in honor of Agrind here Agrind level 31 hardcore no way
Just a shortcut. Just a shortcut. No way he falls through his chest. Bubbles up, let's take a shortcut. There's no way he, like, misclicked bubble or something, right?
He's on his back bar. Does he know he's on his back bar? Wait, like they should be fine.
Not today, Riff. I love it. Sorry, Agra. Sorry.
To be fair, to be fair, my keybind got unbound because I logged that character in during maintenance to test the bug, and it wiped my keybind.
Ah, shoot. I don't know about you guys, but I'm hearing a lot of excuses. Yeah, right, yeah. I remember when one night after our raid, Josh started telling a story about how that happened. You're not alone.
I did one fateful morning on my, I think my name was like level 52. I got up. I hadn't had my coffee yet. And I just, I was like, oh, I have an attempt to remember that I had a core before work.
Big mistake. And I went to do some, oh, yeah. I went to do some quits. And I entered a barn filled with undead. It was a bad move. Go to the barn.
Yeah. But the thing that actually kind of surprised me was just the overwhelming amount of people at, like, well, 6 a.m. California time, anyway, bombarding me with whispers and just messages, guilt messages, too, just saying, like, you know, any mixture of, go again, or my least favorite was, what happened?
And in the moment, you know, I'm like, I just lost my hardcore character, so I'm just kind of... How did you die? What happened? I mean, how did you die? I have questions, too. But, like, it's a really powerful community moment when someone loses their character because it hurts emotionally.
I almost called out Dick that day because I was so upset. But the community brought me up to support each other and to egg each other on and to say, like, yeah, try again. Like, you know what I mean? I mean, like, you know, like, be more careful next time.
Have your coffee before going into that barn. I don't know. It really is a compelling, I think, moment. Now, that's probably a pretty good place to start thinking about what new fun and exciting things we have coming to WOW Forever Hardcore.
Okay. Yeah. So, we're really excited for when we get to Hardcore World Warcraft Forever. We won't have it at launch, but soon. When we get to it, all these new systems and changes we've introduced
and how they'll impact your hardcore experience. Because we know in hardcore you like to put in a lot of extra effort to make sure you're extra safe, you're not going to die. So everything we've changed in trade sales,
where there's new recipes, new things to craft, new consumables, better food, and all those things you can do to be better prepared and the extra effort you can put in. Over 600 new crafting recipes to help you be better prepared.
And the camping system, you can get together your friends, get a few bucks, be a little bit more durable when you go into that cave together. And so there's a lot of opportunities for a whole new experience in hardcore and more dedication you can put into it.
Really excited about that. Do you think the itemization changes that we've made could, you know, yeah? So, again, hundreds of new crafted items, better drops from dungeons. So maybe it's worth the risk to go in there and get those drops and help your journey.
I'm so relieved to drop new items that they never dropped before. All kinds of new stuff to collect. Awesome. Well, I just realized I skipped your story. Do you have a story to share about it?
I feel like I just need to make fun of John. I just need to make fun of myself. I need to make fun of you, too. I'm an easy target. I don't think you're going to have to say anything. I want to tell a story about my family and how much World of Warcraft hardcore means to one of my family members.
So my younger sister is really into hardcore. She plays with the five villager, I believe the guild is called Phoenix, that she's in. And she played World of Warcraft with my two nephews.
They grew up with their uncle working at Blizzard, working on World of Warcraft, and actually worshipped the idea and definitely wanted to play the game. So when they got old enough, she let them play on her account. and bought another computer so that she could play with them with her older son, Sage.
And eventually, her younger son actually took over her account, even renamed it after himself, Jeffrey. And Sage and Jeffrey played together. And really had great adventures amongst the three of them,
and it's a way they bonded together as a family. I was sharing the tragedy that happened seven years ago, and my nephew Jeffrey died. and since then my sister reclaimed her account
and logging into Hardcore and playing in that community has become really important and special to her. Again, that's this tight-knit community where everyone supports each other. When you die, let's go again.
When you need help, yeah, come. We'll send some people over to help you get out of that cage. When you have trouble, somebody can help you through a hard quest. People can give you gold and items to get restarted. It's such a welcoming and supportive community.
Wait, he might have meant diet and support and a little therapy and some joy. And logged into the account, the name is still Jeffrey, every day. Oh, wait, no. No, no, no, never mind, never mind.
No, no, definitely. Okay, very heavy story then. I thought I misinterpreted it for a second. No, no, definitely heard it right the first time. Okay. Well, I guess I'll have to make fun of you later.
That was nice. Okay, that was nice. That was a very deep story. Thank you for sharing. It was really gracious. Well, hardcore has all sorts of perils out in the open world.
There are certain types of perils that are perhaps less, I don't know how I would describe it, fun, fair feeling than others. Can you tell us a little bit about what?
Yeah, so I'll tell you a story when I almost died. As a illustration of this new principle. I actually haven't died in hardcore, but to be fair, I stopped playing at level 50 because Season of Discovery came out. I haven't been back yet.
But my friend Sharif and I were playing a duo in Lach Modan. I was playing a mage, he was playing a paladin. And there's this quest called In Defense of the King's Land. You're trying to go fight Trogs.
You're going higher and higher up into the hills, getting to risky and mysterious spots to find these Trogs to complete the quest. So we're going up in the hills, and it was a Saturday morning, so it was super crowded. and people everywhere, every single trog in the place that smelled like the dead.
So we go further and further up looking for more trogs, and suddenly some of the players around us disappeared. Some other new players appeared, and every single location where there could be trogs
was fully respawned at every trog there could be. And we're right in the middle of it. And I just yell, run, over Gifcord. So I'm running down there as fast as I can, but my Shriek's a paladin, so he bubbles and he's taking his time.
I'm running like crazy as a mage, jump in the middle, attack the Troggans, rock them over to lock them down, jump off a cliff, blink at the bottom, finally get away. And while that's a great story, we really don't like the experience that represents,
where because there are too many or too few players in the area where you are, we need to refresh the world around you. And when you do that refresh, suddenly creatures respawn or creatures are there that weren't there before.
Apparently, I see that. That's a new feature. Okay. If you wanted to get into World of Warcraft forever, it's 50-50 for hardcore. You'll have it in the whole game, but it's for hardcore. When we need to do that world refresh around you,
a new UI will pop up and give you a warning. Say, okay, in three minutes, two minutes 59, two minutes 58, et cetera, we're going to refresh the world around you, get to some workday,
and there's a button you can push to say, I'm somewhere safe this is good go ahead and move me now nice so no more you're going to lose your character to this sudden change of the world very very nice very very very nice
more fair yes good good good shout out to our engineer Daniel Snyder for working on that system I can wait for you guys to check it out Again beta this Thursday Hope to see you all there at least for non but you
could, I guess, impose your own hardcore rules if you wanted to, you know, have a little bit of fun, a little bit of player imposed hardcore. We will be testing that system in the beta. Yeah, absolutely, yeah.
Well, are there any other interesting, compelling differences that players can expect in WoW Forever that they may not have had in, I mean, regular hardcore.
So this is mentioned on another panel earlier today, but it's worth repeating here. In the past, when you died in hardcore, your only choice was to transfer to PDE. Now, when you die in hardcore, you can transfer to PDP, normal, or RP ruleset.
Yes, yes. Very, very, very, very, very good. You know, people like that tension in the world. That's part of what makes Hardcore so fun is having to pay attention all the time. And that tension is maintained when they go to PDC.
You know, a lot of players are going to be excited to do that. I would have been proud of my pal at PDC. New world, unsolved game you've been talking about. New talent, new abilities, new items, new trade skills. So much new stuff is going to be done with G-Class.
So it's a problem to solve all over again. Your old routes to go to the world aren't necessarily going to be the best. or even the right one to follow. There are new rare spawns all over the world
that have items that only drop off those rare spawns. There's new world drops and things to craft. There's a camping system to help you get to buffs, to help each other and work together in camps.
And one thing I'm really excited about is the application of the legacy system to hardcore. So you're playing hardcore, and maybe you get to level 26 and you die. In the past, okay, I lost everything. That's bad.
But now, you're in a legacy point when you get to 25 on that class. So your next run is just a little bit better. Maybe you get a little bit more ref.xd. Maybe you take a little bit more resources from your mineral nodes.
And so you start to tap into the gameplay you see in roguelite games, which I love a lot. I don't like that. You didn't quite make it to the surface this time, but you'll be better for the next time you do more. So a legacy system opens up that opportunity for progression,
even when you don't make it to level 60. I love how the legacy system allows you to re-experience that journey, even in hardcore and non-hardcore, because depending on how many points you earn, where you're spending them,
things could be a little bit different, right? Make it a little bit easier on you, right? Right. How does it work, again, with the transferring between hardcore and non-hardcore? Those legacy system points.
So Anna talked about this this morning, but the legacy points you earn outside of hardcore in fact all of your collections outside of hardcore all that do not transfer into hardcore
so hardcore gets its maintenance for scenes for crashing and suffering for the rest of the game but if you earn them in hardcore they do go to the other so you can transfer them to the other but I think when you inevitably die when you die you shouldn't keep them on another
yeah that's pretty inevitable in hardcore I love the little screen captured on the graphic. Another thing, Chris, too, is, you know, if you look at the legacy trees, there's a PDP one.
What happens in hardcore? Right. So there's a bunch of legacy challenges about PDP. You can't really do PDP in hardcore. So what we are planning on doing when hardcore launches is there are a bunch of hardcore-specific legacy challenges to do.
Sick. Okay, very cool. And we're thinking about even more expansion to that system. Yes. In the future of hardcore. Yes. Where we add new challenges. Yes. And new ways to get perks that are hardcore-specific. Yes.
Very good. Very good. Very good. That's what we like to do around here. Well, we love hardcore a lot. It sounds like you guys do, too.
What ever topic we cover that we should talk about or should share, what interesting tidbits do we want to share? I think one of the things that I'm most excited about with Wow Forever Hardcore is,
you know, part of the skill expression of hardcore is knowing the world and knowing what quests are deadly, what caves are deadly, whatever caves are deadly, but you know what I mean. And Wow Forever, we are going to continue to make content at all level ranges.
It's not just low-level content. And so for those who really want to kind of challenge themselves, we're going to have lots of new content coming over update after update after update, and you'll have maybe different routes or different ways to go for those who are kind of enterprising.
And you get to have even more skill expression of learning the optimal ways to level through, you know, the river glades and what is dangerous and what isn't. And, you know, creating, like, anything can get stale if you do it long enough
and if you get, you know, a certain level of mastery. So being able to continue to add opportunities to achieve mastery is a good thing. And that's something that we're super excited about with WoW Forever.
We kind of have this commitment to continue to add content in all different level ranges. It's really an opportunity for you to develop a new mastery of the game. You play hardcore to show what you know, what you've learned, how good you are at World of Warcraft,
you know where this quest is, where this topic, where this monster patrols, and now there's new things to master that adjust to what we have from 22 years ago. That sounds good. It's an unsolved game now with WoW Forever.
I'm particularly excited about the hardcore community. Anytime I've jumped in, I've found players who are helpful, kind, encouraging, willing to help me out, help me survive, really.
And I've had a blast in the, you know, hardcore classic, just jumping in with my friends. Shout out to Oath to Order if you're watching this right now. I also joined up with, like, a fun little guild called HC Cuties,
and they were very fun and awesome. Oh, I was in HC Cuties as well. Yeah, just an amazing community. and I really look forward to jumping in there again, making new friends, perhaps some of you in the crowd,
and, you know, just, I don't know, hopefully surviving, hopefully not going into a barn, jumping off of a cliff, forgetting my bubble. Just forget friends when you go in the barn. Yeah. It's just a different kind of cave. Do you mind if I give one chance, tiny little tease?
A tease? Yeah. So, we almost forgot about Macaron. Okay, okay. You know, obviously Makara has been a, I would say, unexpectedly popular part of hardcore,
but I think we can all appreciate a good duel to the death. Oh, yeah. And, you know, something that has been asked of us for a really long time is, like, what if we had a dedicated space for Makara content?
Oh, yeah, that's what we need. Yeah. It would be kind of cool. Yes, yes. It would be something we're working on for a future update, maybe, maybe. Yeah, that's what we need. That's what we're talking about. No arena is something like this.
This is insane. Wow. That was completely off script. I might get in trouble for that later. Thank you. That's what we like to grab right there, baby. It's a great place to wrap things up.
I just want to say thank you, everyone, for taking this journey with us. Thank you for even just today just letting us kind of walk through memory lane, share a couple tidbits about what we're excited to encounter in Wild Forever Hardcore.
If you are, you know, watching this from home, also, obviously, thank you again. If you're here in person, however, please consider sticking around for the Arena World Championship Grand Final.
I'm watching that right after this. Right after this. Let's go. Not this panel. Stick. Stick. Okay. So, La Carra ruling area, that's genius. no-brainer, super cool.
What else? You get legacy talents that stay after death. I don't like that. I know people say, well, just don't spend them. I personally think that's a terrible argument. Just to disprove the argument quickly,
it's the same argument as, oh, give flying if you don't like it, then don't use flying. Come on, guys. Oh, give movement speed if you don't like it, just don't use the extra movement speed. Come on, bad argument. Terrible argument. If it's not good, it shouldn't be in the game, period.
Not just don't use it. So, yeah, don't like that. Maybe we can chat with them and get it out of there. But, yeah.