Incline World of Warcraft classic+/remix (TurtleWoW 2.0 on Unreal Engine 5 announced)

[ADL]

TURTLE WOW (LAUNCHED)​

A story expansion inspired by the Warcraft universe of Blizzard Entertainment and developed by the Turtle WoW Team. This project aims to take a different path from the Burning Crusade, emphasizing the familiar Azeroth of Vanilla WoW over the cosmic battle with the Burning Legion. While being heavily based on the lore from Warcraft 3 and Vanilla WoW, Mysteries of Azeroth seeks to enhance the game by adding content that matches the already well-established lore of Warcraft Universe.​

FEATURES​

1.12-based vanilla client
Every class has been extensively rebalanced (Druid, Mage, Priest, Shaman, Warrior, Hunter, Paladin, Rogue, and Warlock)
New playable races: Goblins (Horde) and High Elves (Alliance) featuring new race+class combos
Entirely new zones and locations containing new factions1500 custom quests and a custom soundtrack
Custom raids and dungeons

Existing content stays relevant: All expansion content runs in parallel to existing vanilla content starting at level 10 running all the way up to 60.​

Server status: Launched. It's one of the largest private servers out there, a month or two ago we had 6K queues. Here's a population graph.
Unreal 5 client coming in 2025

DUSKHAVEN REFORGED (Q1 2024)​

Duskhaven Reforged aims to provide a different story expansion within the world of Azeroth during the time of Vanilla WoW. Azeroth, having faced a calamity at the hands of the Infinite Dragonflight, was left broken, and with the loss of key figures who were crucial to the timeline, has left the world now doomed by the effects of the calamity.

This forces the hand of Chromie, who sends our Warriors of Azeroth into an alternative timeline so that they may rebuild their strength. However, this mysterious land isn't quite the mirror they expected, for the fabric of reality itself seems to be unraveling. It's a race to discover what new threads they might uncover, to stich this timeline back together while under the gaze of Murozond and the Infinite Dragonflight.

FEATURES​

3.3.5-based WotLK client (but they gut TBC/WotLK content)
HD models
New playable races (Goblin, Illidari, Broken, and Worgen)Custom classes (Bard, Demon Hunter, Monk, and Tinker)
Extensive class rebalances using new talent trees inspired by Dragonflight
Custom raids, dungeons and quests including Mythic+
Cross faction guilds, dungeons and raids
Account-wide reputation and title/mount unlocks
Existing content stays relevant: All expansion content runs in parallel to existing vanilla content

Server status: Private beta in December, expected to launch Q1 2024
(This is actually my favorite server. They're rebuilding it on a new core to clean up some messy code and add in some features they couldn't do previously)​

PROJECT EPOCH (Q2 2024)​

Project Epoch is a new Classic+ experience built on the foundations of the 3.3.5 client with extensive modifications made to deliver an entirely custom vanilla+ experience.

FEATURES​

3.3.5-based WotLK client (but they gut TBC/WotLK content)
Classic+ itemization rebalance affecting 15,000+ items
New race/class combos with the ability to swap racial bonuses at level 60
The Burning Crusade-era class balance and combat experience
Custom and redesigned dungeons and raids
Hundreds of custom quests
Cross faction grouping, chat, and trade
Account-wide reputation and title/mount unlocks
Existing content stays relevant: All expansion content runs in parallel to existing vanilla content​

https://youtu.be/2u4SJbVPB2I

Server status: Beta 2.5 taking place on November 17th, there will be one more round of beta tests after that in early January with a launch anticipated in Q2 2024.​

WORLD OF WARCRAFT CLASSIC: SEASON OF DISCOVERY (OFFICIAL, PAID, NOVEMBER 30TH)​

In Season of Discovery, players will discover new secrets by scouring Azeroth to find class-altering abilities. Tanking Warlocks, Mage healers, and more will be possible. The Season will launch with an initial level cap of 25, and upon reaching max level, players will be met with a new level-25 endgame! Discover a 10-player Blackfathom Deeps raid with new and reimagined bosses, mechanics, and rewards. Not long after, the level cap will be increased by a few levels, bringing even more endgame content.

FEATURES​

Class and role-altering Rune Engraving system
Level-banded content phases (25/40/50/60) featuring new content and new loot throughout each phase
New level-up raids (Blackfathom Deep reimagined as a 10-man raid for phase 1)
Hinted at dual spec and reimplementing unfinished/unused locations for future content such as Gnomeragan, the Scarlet Monestary, and Karazhan Crypts
Server status: Launched, currently in Phase 4
Classic+ confirmed

WOW REMIX MISTS OF PANDARIA​

WoW Remix: Mists of Pandaria?​

World of Warcraft Remix is a time-limited event which allows players to re-experience the entirety of the Mists of Pandaria expansion at an accelerated rate from level 10 through 70. All loot has been completely overhauled and has powerful new effects allowing players to shape their experience, power up, and power on. Features include:

• Accelerated Leveling and Content allowing you to take on nearly every quest, scenario, dungeon and raid.
• Create a new WoW Remix character starting at level 10 to adventure through the event up to level 70.
• A mountain of loot: Get powerful items from everywhere— quests, chests, creatures, bosses.
• Customizable items allowing you to power up as far as you can go to take on tougher content.
• Convert unwanted items into Bronze which can be used to upgrade items or purchase cosmetics.
• Keep what you collect: Take your collection of transmogs with you into The War Within.

https://worldofwarcraft.blizzard.co...under-development-wow-remix-mists-of-pandaria
Server status: Ended

 

[ADL]

Reserved for future edits and infodumps. Classic is boomer nostalgiabait and hardcore is a dumb waste of time.

Classic+ is where it's at and it's a damn shame it has taken so long for projects like these to become popular even though Old School Runescape exists and did the same thing where they treat it like an alternate timeline where they didn't fuck up the game. Ended up being exponentially more popular than retail. This is what Blizzard should've done five years ago.

 

[Frank Capicoli]

Vanilla+ is so depopulated it didn't even get a mention here I see.

 

[ADL]

Need to give it a shot one of these days, they have nice XP rates that would make it a nice alt server to play for their content. I know someone that plays Vanilla+ and swears by it but I hear their peak populations are extremely low (<100)

Old video but it's the only thing they have on their website and YouTube channel.

 

[Ninjerk]

Not sure what the peak of Tel'Abim (fresh Turtle PvP) was (I'd guess 6k or so in the first couple days) and it's gone down to 3k (plus or minus 400) or so this past weekend.

The extent of class reworks is uneven. Some of the gear changes they've made are pretty broken. For example, there's a quest to kill elites in the courtyard outside Scarlet Monastery that rewards a choice of (I think) three weapons. For my warrior, I chose the Scarlet Pillar. I'm hard pressed to find the stats now but I'm pretty sure it blows everything out of the water until Whirlwind Axe, Pendulum of Doom, and Ravager and takes about 5 minutes to get (including the run to Brill to get the quest). As another example, I believe the green dragonscale set not only has its original 3-piece set bonus of 15% of Spirit-based regeneration but also at least 2, if not all 3, pieces have 5% Spirit-based regeneration on them.

People seem to like the integrated radio addon, which I haven't listened to but from comments on world chat it seems they're playing things like Diablo 2 OST tracks.

There is a default world chat channel that is effectively global barrens chat. Today, there was talk of racism and censorship. I imagine there must be some Codexers playing there because of how the conversation went.

Overall, I'm having fun, but I'm not sure the people adding content to the game and doing the class rebalancing have any idea what they're doing. I consider this server a reasonably populated trial run for the next quality fresh PvP server.

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Not a vanilla private server, but I enjoyed playing on Ascension for a couple weeks. There were several unique features to Ascension:

• My favorite was that it was classless. You can mix and match talents and abilities from every spec in the game. If you want to be a bear who has bear pets with the Ascension custom enchants that spawned more pet bears in combat, you could do that. Unfortunately the game is built on WotLK code so I'm not sure if monks or demon hunters will ever get in. It would be very nice to acquire the monk's dragon kick ability.
• There are a lot of custom enchants that augment your abilities, ie enchants that boost fire damage, enchants that spawn additional bears, etc. So there is even more build possibility.
• They expanded the number of mob families you can tame. You can tame not just beasts, but also undead, demons, dragons, and elementals.
• High risk PvP: the game has war mode like retail where players with their PvP flags turn on are in a different phase from PvErs. In Ascension's high risk PvP, you drop one piece of equipped gear if you die and it can be looted by the player who killed you. The best crafting materials can only be harvested in high risk PvP, and there are supply drop crates that contain really good loot to fight over. In addition to Horde vs Alliance, players can also become outlaws and attack members of their own faction. Outlaws have to hang out at Booty Bay or Ratchet. There is also an opt-mode where you can create a character aligned with the Burning Legion, acquiring demon abilities and hanging out in a Legion area, and then airdropping into PvP areas with high activity.
• No armor restrictions on transmog. You can transmog plate, mail, leather, cloth, class exclusive gear, race exclusive gear, whatever. They backported a lot of the transmogs, mounts, and druid forms from retail WoW. The downside is that a lot of them were locked behind a cash shop or were only obtainable from limited time events, which is a turn off. Also, only the vanilla and TBC races are in. No Worgen/Goblins/Pandaren/allied races. They did backport in retail customizations for the Vanilla and TBC races, though.

The downside of the game is that the focus is on the high risk PvP. Ascension has its own implementation of Mythic+, but you can do that on retail anyway so if you're playing a custom server like Ascension you want to be checking out the unique thing about that server, and in Ascension's case it's the high risk PvP. Unfortunately this competitive environment which actual death penalties means that your viable build options are very limited. Like GW2, there is an enormous performance disparity between builds. If you want to play high risk PvP, you sadly just can't play your own class fantasy, as that will probably deal relatively low DPS and be crushed and you will lose your stuff. You instead have to play one of the meta builds and they will massively outperform anything you come up with on your own. You can play whatever you want in the PvE content, but questing is just what you've already done before on retail, and mythic+ is mythic+, so it's hard to justify PvEing on Ascension over playing Retail.

A few years ago, the Ascension devs announced a fork called Conquest of Azeroth. Shares a lot of the same system as Ascension, but the main difference is that instead of being able to mix and match talents and abilities from the existing WoW classes, they instead created a bunch of brand new classes like Knight of Xoroth (some sort of blood/fire demon knight) or Venomancer (Troll druids who turn into spiders and scorpions), tinkers, Starcaller (night elf Moon Priestess), Witch Hunter (based on the Warhammer Fantasy archetype), Son of Arugal (turn into a werewolf), etc. I think there is also Demon Hunter but IDK if they backported the class from retail or if it's different.

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

I hear Classic will allow mixing abilities/talents from different classes. Anyone got any info, i.e. when and what exactly it's going to be?

 

[Frank Capicoli]

Trying out Turtle again. Releasing their version of Gilneas as a newly design zone at level 42 has been interesting. Haven't gotten around to doing the dungeon they added there Gilneas City but if it's anything like Crescent Grove it should be gud.

 

[Reever]

People seem to like the integrated radio addon, which I haven't listened to but from comments on world chat it seems they're playing things like Diablo 2 OST tracks.

It mostly plays WoW/Warcraft music with fake radio-style "ads" in-between but sometimes they spice it up. They also have a few hosts that present the news or do various shows. One of them played some Fallout music.

 

[blessed king of longing]

ill be playing season of discovery NA with some people but no realm determined yet

 

[lvl 2 Blue Slime]

I hope SoD makes Balance Druid viable.

 

[Frank Capicoli]

TWoW should shuffle all these hardcore autists to their own server instead of launching a pvp server.

 

[Lyric Suite]

I played Turtle WoW up to the point i got to try that custom dungeon they made around the area with the satyrs and shit.

It wasn't... bad actually. An open area instance that seemed confusing at first but actually had a recognizable layout. The extra loot was interesting too.

I gave up quickly as i usually do when replaying WoW this days, but the new stuff was neither terribad nor grince, seemed to fit the style of vanilla pretty well, for whatever that's worth. The new content was actually better than anything Blizzard themselves added when they started to muck around the world back in Cataclysm, with all the new quests being cringe and stupidily written, which is something in a game where the writing was already pretty basic to begin with. The extra quests in Turtle WoW were actually better than that stuff. Again not an high bar to clear but still. Fucking Blizzard.

 

[NwNgger]

Here's a server I found. Wallcraft.



I don't know if it would be considered Vanilla plus as it's basically Alpha+. It takes the leaked alpha version of WoW and fleshes out and expands upon the ideas and mechanics from that that didn't make it into retail. This includes things like the alpha versions of Northrend, Outland, Ironforge, and the Emerald Dream that were at one point going to be shipped in the retail vanilla game but were cut later.

 

[Frank Capicoli]

Finished up tanking Turtle WoW's recent new dungeon Hate Forge Quarry on my druid. Thematically as the name suggests it's an area separate of Black Rock Depths in the Burning Steppes owned by the dark iron dwarves. Aesthetically every custom dungeon so far has been very nice looking considering what they have to work with. It's a fairly short dungeon at around 20 minutes or so to clear probably faster if you're a overpowered paladin tank. Mob balance seems to follow the Gnomergan logic where trash mobs are the real threat and not bosses. Mobs in the custom dungeons hit far harder than anything else in their level range and are more often than not humanoids only adding more desire for mages compared to some other dps classes.

Loot is good in all of the custom dungeons. Hate Forge Quarry so much so that it incentivizes level 60s to run it for potential pre-raid best in slots.

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

Wallcraft.

I once made a thread on reddit to see if my vision of WoW would interest anyone. To probe the market, see if it was an economically viable product.
Spoiler: they didn't like it. But it reminds me of Wallcraft to a degree.

Here's what I wrote back then:

Hi. I'm an MMO programmer and a long time MMO enthusiast. I have a few strong opinions about what WoW did wrong and had them back in 2004. I think it trivialized the experience at some levels and made other levels an immense pain to deal with. Between levels 1 and 20 it's always fun, but it's all over with very quickly. Levels 20-40 were monotonous, I think an MMO could offer more activities than a monorail quest/dungeon routine. Levels 40-60 were always a pain in the ass, involving heavy grind. And after long hours of heavy duty lifting, you "celebrate", because you've reached "the real game", the level 60, which I never thought should be like this. I propose the game becomes partially "raidable" at level 40, pushing towards heavy cooperation. But at your own risk, because death means the loss of XP and gear.

The economy was never alive at any levels, because items are soul bound, which was never a thing in the older MMOs. World PVP weirdly enough existed either as gank fest, or as a non-entity. I could go on listing such problems, but the rest of my qualms are smaller and would take some time to tie up with other mechanics.

I've been pondering my own version of WoW and I think I could make it happen, but only if people are interested.
So what do you think? I'll list the major changes below. I don't know if you can imagine the complete picture of what you'd be getting. It'd be reminiscent of the old Ultima Online or MUDs experience.
Here are the unique changes:

• No bound items, i.e. freely unequip and trade away anything.
• XP loss and gear drop on death.
• You're rewarded greatly for killing mobs above your level, but this comes with a risk, obviously.
• You have an hour to recover your dropped loot. If you don't, it becomes publicly lootable.
• Items age. Hoarding your best loot serves nothing, as it'll decay in time. In practical terms, a blue item will decay after a month. An epic takes two months.
• Blue gear and above exists in limited numbers. E.g. only 5 copies of a certain sword exist at the same time. The owner will not own it forever, since it'll eventually decay and become droppable again.
• No level requirements for gear. (with the item being somewhat weaker if you're low level, but retaining a small part of its OP power)
• A fixed amount of gold in the economy, in order to avoid inflation.
• Spells and abilities for >20 level are learned from scrolls, which are hard to acquire. Grouping up is encouraged.
• Level plays no role in To Hit formula.
• As a result, raiding is possible after level 40 with good gear, if you're careful enough. There is much less meaningful difference between level 50 and 60 than in retail.
• Dungeons are not personal instances, but a place for everyone. They reset occasionally, teleporting everyone to the beginning. Competition for content is a thing.
• PVP is opt-in to an extent. But once your character is in, it can't go back to being a civilian. You can still get killed, but getting killed for no good reason will never happen.
• PVP is not free for all. Attack too many characters who didn't opt-in and you'll become hostile in all cities, get killed, lose levels and suffer greatly. So there will be no reckless murder of everyone.
• Guilds can compete (through pvp) for control of in-game fortresses, which have been modified to serve as guild bases. This comes with its own perks.

As a result, it's a game more oriented towards cooperation, raiding early, economy should be alive and brimming with gear, world pvp becomes a healthy thing, and many game healing changes.
Would you play this? And how do I find out if people would? I never played on non-retail servers, so I don't know the scene. It would take a lot of time and effort to make this vision of WoW, so I'd really like to be sure people would be interested, before working on it.

 

[Myobi]

• No bound items, i.e. freely unequip and trade away anything.
• XP loss and gear drop on death.
• You're rewarded greatly for killing mobs above your level, but this comes with a risk, obviously.
• You have an hour to recover your dropped loot. If you don't, it becomes publicly lootable.
• Items age. Hoarding your best loot serves nothing, as it'll decay in time. In practical terms, a blue item will decay after a month. An epic takes two months.
• Blue gear and above exists in limited numbers. E.g. only 5 copies of a certain sword exist at the same time. The owner will not own it forever, since it'll eventually decay and become droppable again.
• No level requirements for gear. (with the item being somewhat weaker if you're low level, but retaining a small part of its OP power)
• A fixed amount of gold in the economy, in order to avoid inflation.
• Spells and abilities for >20 level are learned from scrolls, which are hard to acquire. Grouping up is encouraged.
• Level plays no role in To Hit formula.
• As a result, raiding is possible after level 40 with good gear, if you're careful enough. There is much less meaningful difference between level 50 and 60 than in retail.
• Dungeons are not personal instances, but a place for everyone. They reset occasionally, teleporting everyone to the beginning. Competition for content is a thing.
• PVP is opt-in to an extent. But once your character is in, it can't go back to being a civilian. You can still get killed, but getting killed for no good reason will never happen.
• PVP is not free for all. Attack too many characters who didn't opt-in and you'll become hostile in all cities, get killed, lose levels and suffer greatly. So there will be no reckless murder of everyone.
• Guilds can compete (through pvp) for control of in-game fortresses, which have been modified to serve as guild bases. This comes with its own perks.

This was pretty much Lineage 2.

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

LA2 had such a heavy grind that it was something us europeans couldn't handle imo. Needed slanted eyes to play that game. A different mentality.
Didn't have all of the above, but yeah, good comparison otherwise.

 

[ADL]

Today @ 1PM Pacific Standard Time

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I am scratching my head as to why Blizzard keeps stumbling with server issues. They've been doing launches for two decades. You'd think they'd have this to a science now.

 

[blessed king of longing]

 

[blessed king of longing]

guy tried to merc me while i was idling (after i killed him), didn't go well

 

[Lyric Suite]

I am scratching my head as to why Blizzard keeps stumbling with server issues. They've been doing launches for two decades. You'd think they'd have this to a science now.

New people, fresh batch of retards with no experience.

 

[mediocrepoet]

I am scratching my head as to why Blizzard keeps stumbling with server issues. They've been doing launches for two decades. You'd think they'd have this to a science now.

All the tech bros got chased out in the purge. Now all you got are tumblrinas.

 

[deama]

A few years ago, the Ascension devs announced a fork called Conquest of Azeroth. Shares a lot of the same system as Ascension, but the main difference is that instead of being able to mix and match talents and abilities from the existing WoW classes, they instead created a bunch of brand new classes like Knight of Xoroth (some sort of blood/fire demon knight) or Venomancer (Troll druids who turn into spiders and scorpions), tinkers, Starcaller (night elf Moon Priestess), Witch Hunter (based on the Warhammer Fantasy archetype), Son of Arugal (turn into a werewolf), etc. I think there is also Demon Hunter but IDK if they backported the class from retail or if it's different.

I recently bought access to it and was trying out the classes.

Monk wasn't too bad, monks are usually my favourite class (fist style) and in here the implementation is ok. You can pick higher movement speed and there's a nice double jump you get that you can morph into a non-target leap double jump, sort of like the retail demon hunter but more janky looking and a bit higher air time, also, way more forward momentum, sort of like the warrior leap ability, and it's got a nice 8 sec cooldown. I still would have liked even more speed though. In terms of combat, it felt pretty good. The idea was to have a type of combo system, where you attack with a basic ability e.g. "jab", and then follow it up with a flashy combo move, like sweeping kick to hit multiple enemies around you, or uppercut to do more damage to single target etc... it felt good especially since the cooldowns were low to begin with, and I was suprised you could lower them even more from a talent tree.

I tried the venomancer but didn't like it as much as I thought. The spider transformation was quite cool, but didn't have that much going for it, I was hoping for stuff like wall climbing, or doing something fancy with webs, but none of that was a thing, it sort of felt like the druid cat transformation but spider themed.

I tried the demon hunter class, and it's different from retail. I didn't see anything to do with double jumps, however they have added in a very nice general dash ability that is charge based. You hold 3 charges and it has an 8 sec cooldown, the distance is decent and apparently increases with higher movement speed. You also transform into a partial demon with wings if you hit max rage for 15 or so secs that gives you +5% more damage (can be upgraded from talent tree), and later on can upgrade it to also give you more movement speed. Overall I thought it felt pretty decent, could have used a double jump though.

The necromancer was very interesting, but sadly they just haven't gone far enough with it. In the beginning you can summon 3 skeletons, and then later you can summon up to 5 skeletons... and that's it... that's as high as you will ever go...
That is so extremly dissapointing because the base core of the necromancer is very enjoyable, but max 5 summons if you spec fully into summoning? You're kidding...
At least the skeletons/summons scale with your intelligence, so you don't need to worry about that.

I also tried son of arugal, was ok, not as interesting as I thought it'd be. The werewolf transformation was a bit iffy in terms of usage, has a 1 minute cooldown and only lasts for 30 secs, you can upgrade so the cooldown is lowered to just 15 secs, but then it'll cost you max rage...

I also tried the lightning mage and was kinda dissapointed, but I was expecting the flash, it did have a nice dash ability though.

The server itself is kinda dead, though I haven't tried dungeons/raiding, just travelling in the overworld was pretty bare and I hardly found anyone. Maybe they doing those mana dungeons now or something? But the cities weren't that populated either.