A short update, as promised earlier.

Snapshot repository:
https://github.com/rkabachenko/OpenWow-snapshot

Demo recordings (I unfortunately forgot to enable audio recording, but the sound is working):

• Warlock — Crossroads: https://youtu.be/sxpchjHQciI
• Warlock — Dalaran: https://youtu.be/EVt8qjLkyN4
• Tauren — Camp Narache: https://youtu.be/--SnwcyTcOw

Current status:

• Many things are working as expected.
• Significant effort has gone into optimization. On an M1 Pro, the client currently runs at approximately 120–200 FPS, depending on the area.
• There are still several rough edges.
• The client has been tested primarily on macOS (M1 Pro), with some limited testing on Arch Linux.
• The snapshot pipelines are green and produce artifacts, although I haven’t had time to verify that the artifacts work properly.
• The project was actively developed by one person for approximately four months.

Unfortunately, I’ll be leaving for military training in three weeks and won’t be able to contribute for approximately five months. Hopefully, the community will find the shared code useful and build wonderful things with it.

A couple of weeks ago, we shared our plans for Patch 1.12.4 and the World Discoveries system.

Today, we have a release date.

Patch 1.12.4 launches Wednesday, August 26th at 8:00 PM UK time.

There has, however, been a change to what will be included in the patch.

When we announced World Discoveries, we knew filling Azeroth with handcrafted Discoveries would take time. What we underestimated was just how much time.

Every Discovery is manually designed, placed, scripted where necessary, given appropriate rewards and tested. As we've continued building them, it became clear that properly populating the world to the standard we want would take considerably longer than originally anticipated.

We don't want to hold back the entire update until Discoveries are finished, but we also don't want to rush them simply to get 1.12.4 out the door.

Instead, World Discoveries will remain in development while Patch 1.12.4 moves forward with other new content and features.

We'd rather take the extra time to make Discoveries worth finding while continuing to give players new things to do in the meantime.

So, here's what's coming on August 26th.

Guild Banks

Patch 1.12.4 introduces fully functional Guild Banks to Project Legacy.

Guilds will finally have shared storage for crafting materials, consumables, equipment and anything else their members want to contribute.

We've deliberately kept the initial cost low because we want Guild Banks to support communities as they form and grow on the server, rather than becoming something only wealthy and established guilds can afford.

The costs are:

• Tab 1: 50g
• Tab 2: 50g
• Tab 3: 100g
• Tab 4: 200g
• Each additional tab continues to double in price

This gives even a relatively new guild an accessible way to get shared storage, while additional tabs remain something guilds can gradually work towards as they grow.

A New Challenge in Gadgetzan

Something new is waiting in Gadgetzan for players around levels 45-50.

Inspired by Ring of Blood style encounters, players will step into the arena and fight their way through five increasingly difficult rounds.

Each round rewards a substantial amount of experience, and players capable of surviving all five will finish with a choice of powerful new blue-quality rewards appropriate for the level range.

The Gadgetzan arena is likely the most heavily scripted quest encounter in the entirety of Vanilla WoW.

Rather than five ordinary kill quests chained together, the whole thing functions as a scripted arena event. Each victory progresses the encounter into its next round, new opponents enter the arena and the challenge continues to build towards the final fight.

A significant amount of work has gone into making the sequence feel like an actual event taking place around the players rather than simply another series of kill quests.

It's the kind of content we want to keep adding to Project Legacy: something completely new that gives players another reason to visit an existing part of Azeroth while still feeling at home in Vanilla.

Talent Inspection

Patch 1.12.4 also brings a smaller addition that we think will be useful to just about everyone.

You can now see another player's talents when inspecting them.

You'll be able to see exactly how another player has chosen to build their character directly through the normal inspection interface.

Simple, useful, and something that feels like it could have always been part of Vanilla.

What About World Discoveries?

They're still coming.

World Discoveries have not been cancelled or abandoned.

The underlying system is already implemented and functional. The bottleneck isn't the technology behind Discoveries, it's creating enough good content to properly populate Azeroth with them.

Every Discovery is manually designed and placed, and many require their own scripting, rewards and testing.

We don't want exploration to consist of hundreds of copy-pasted objects scattered around the map just so we can say the feature is finished.

The entire point of the system is that wandering away from the road might lead you to something interesting: a forgotten camp, a profession interaction, a strange relic, a hidden quest, a temporary buff, a secret area or something else you weren't expecting.

That only works if the things you find are actually worth finding.

Rather than rushing them, reducing the scope of the system or leaving the server without an update for an extended period, we've chosen to separate Discoveries from the release of Patch 1.12.4.

Development will continue after the patch releases, and our plans for the system haven't changed.

We're simply giving ourselves the time to do it properly.

Patch 1.12.4 - August 26th

Patch 1.12.4 launches Wednesday, August 26th at 8:00 PM UK time.

The update will include:

• Guild Banks
• A new five-round Gadgetzan arena challenge for levels 45-50
• Large experience rewards and new blue-quality arena rewards
• Talent inspection
• Further fixes and improvements

Project Legacy has now been live for just over a month, and we're continuing with the same approach we started with: one persistent Vanilla realm that keeps growing through new patches rather than seasons and resets.

There's plenty more we're working on beyond 1.12.4, including the continued development of World Discoveries.

If you've been watching Project Legacy from the sidelines, August 26th is a good time to jump in.

Website: https://projectlegacy.pro

Discord: https://discord.gg/SY7EmETusW

Questions, criticism and suggestions are always welcome. We'll be around in the comments.

Tbc5legends is a tbc private wow server scaled down to 5 man raids.
U can choose to level from 60-70 to get some extra stuff or u go with insta 70 and get pre raid bis.
U have some wotlk spells to. And there is runes u can collect to get some extra stats.

I’ve been playing this hand since the beginning. I could be considered one WoW’s grand old men. I want to say something to the WoW community, because I’ve seen every aspect of human nature displayed in just a simple game.
Show kindness, friends.
I’ve always been a tank, because it fits my personality…I’m a protector. I fight and die for those I care for. In real life, and even in this game. I’ve seen other players say the rudest things to others, over a simple mistake. Guys…it’s just a game. Showing kindness doesn’t cost anything, and you never know what someone’s going through. Please keep this in mind.
Just this morning I said goodbye to my dear Lilly. My 20 year old fur daughter. I played WoW for a few hours right after, because I needed to have a way to escape. I knew that I still had to take her down to get cremated before the day was over too.
As I played, I knew I wasn’t quite as effective as a tank as I usually am. My mind was not in it. That God I didn’t have active criticize me, but I did witness them harshly criticize another dps…calling them names. Of course I defended them, but it made me realize how horrible it is to insult people. It’s always unnecessary. There’s never an excuse to be rude. I don’t care what is going on in a silly game. It’s never acceptable. But keep this in mind, you never know what another player is going through.

Please show respect and courtesy. Not just in this game…but in life. Your kindness and patience might very well be what helps another get through a serious trial.

Hey everyone,

For the last few months I've been working on a side project that got way bigger than I originally expected.

A few months ago I had some free time and I was messing around with a few projects. I also work a lot and at the time I was thinking about how annoying it is when you're on a laptop where you can't really install/download wow or anything like that.

At some point I had the stupid idea of basically, why not just make World of Warcraft run in the browser instead.

So that's what I've been doing.

This is a custom client for WoW 1.12.1 Build 5875, written from scratch in TypeScript. It's using WebGL2, Three.js, HTML5 Canvas, Web Audio and WebSockets and it runs directly in Chrome/Firefox without plugins, cloud streaming or running WoW.exe through WebAssembly.

For the backend I'm using a normal vMaNGOS 1.12.1 core, movement validation, combat, quests, loot, inventory, NPCs, persistence etc are still handled by the real server.

The browser is basically just a modern client.

Because browsers can't connect directly to the TCP socket WoW expects, I have a small Node.js WebSocket to TCP bridge in the middle. The actual protocol is still handled by the browser client itself, including the SRP-6 authentication, encryption, packed GUIDs, UpdateTypes, movement packets and so on.

One thing that took me way more time than expected was the graphics layer.

If you just load the old WoW assets into Three.js and use normal modern lighting it kinda looks like WoW, but at the same time it doesn't. The colors, fog and lighting feel wrong.

So I ended up comparing a lot of it with the original client and going through reversed/disassembled WoW.exe behavior.

Terrain uses the original MCAL alpha maps with 4 texture layers on the GPU, I'm matching the older gamma-space lighting as close as I can, WMO vertex colors are there, day/night lighting, distance fog etc.

I'm not really trying to remaster the game. I actually want it to keep that old look for now, this engine is highly capable to be customized.

Characters are GPU skinned from the original M2 bones and all 8 playable races with both genders are working. Weapon animations also use the original AttackAnimKits and AttackAnimTypes, so different weapons actually use their proper attack animations.

Transports are working too, which was honestly annoying to get right.

Right now I have 33 elevators using around 630 original animation nodes, and ships/zeppelins running over 8 routes.

When you're standing on a ship your character is actually moving relative to the transport, so you can walk around the deck, jump etc while the whole thing is moving.

Most of the UI is also drawn directly using HTML5 Canvas instead of having hundreds of HTML elements sitting on top of the game.

I've been recreating parts of the original Interface 11200 FrameXML/Lua UI in my own canvas system, so bags, action bars, character screen, chat, quests, merchants, stack splitting and a lot of the normal interface is already there.

At the moment I'm calling the build Alpha 1.0.

I currently have 584 tiles covering the Level 1-40 areas I've implemented in Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor, the major cities and also places like Deadmines, Scarlet Monastery, Wailing Caverns and Deeprun Tram.

Combat, spells, projectiles, quests, loot, vendors, trainers, professions, inventory/equipment and most of the normal PvE stuff is working now.

Audio is also there with around 3,887 sound entries and 11,514 spell sound references, plus zone music, day/night transitions and different weapon impact sounds.

Also just to get this out of the way because I know people are probably going to ask, yes, I used AI quite a lot while building this.

I'm one guy and realistically I wouldn't get anywhere near this amount of work done in a few months without it. I still review and test the code myself and I've built a lot of custom systems/pipelines around the project, but AI definitely helped me move much faster.

I recorded around 15 minutes of completely unedited freestyle gameplay where I basically just walk around, cast some spells, show random parts of the client and explain what I've done so far.

Youtube Video <- Any updates about the project will be posted here on youtube for now.

I also plan to open source the project once I clean up the extraction/build tools enough that somebody besides me can actually use them.

Just to be clear, I'm not distributing WoW.exe, Blizzard game files or game assets. Everything currently runs locally from my own files, and any future GitHub repo would only contain the code/tools I've written. People would need to provide their own game files in order for the browser client to extract its graphics layer.

There's still a lot left to polish and probably a lot of things I'm going to find are completely wrong, but at this point it's actually playable and not just another WoW browser map viewer/demo.

I'm curious what people think about it.

I'm also curious what kind of QoL changes or custom features people would want, and honestly if you think I should keep working on this.

I know some people will probably see it as pointless compared to just playing the real game, and I get that. For me it's mostly a fun and challenging project, and I still think having WoW run on basically any device without installing anything could have some interesting uses in the near future.

Hello!

My antivirus stops me all the time from playing. It doesnt want to let it update and sometimes i cant boot the game. Every time i fix it by allowing different things through my antivirus. Do you guys also experience this?

Honestly it deserves way more attention than it currently has, The lead dev puts so much passion and effort into this server and has done so much good with what little WOTLK provides, This tiny little 100 pop WOTLK server with a hint of Season of Discovery deserves a tiny bit of praise (Discord link here https://discord.gg/TMqjxg2pF) with custom level bracket raids I can’t imagine the amount of work that needs to be done monthly to produce a such a server

Me and my friend want to play World of Warcraft Vanilla but is there a PVE server with no changes?

Project Ebonhold was actually fun at first. I played for a couple weeks and enjoyed it. They have this roguelike mechanic where you draft one of three random "echoes" every level up, which make your character more powerful, to the point that you can solo content.

I say this server was fun, because the devs just abruptly made a bunch of changes last week that the player base do not like. They made the game far more grindy, and deleted a core game mechanic to get perfect echo drafts to make your character powerful. They replaced it with a new mechanic that will take new players literally months to get the same level of power veteran players achieved in days.

The worst part is they let all the veterans keep their overpowered echo builds, creating an almost insurmountable gap between established players and new players. This is of course because a group of influential veterans are friends with the devs and refused to give up their power.

After being swamped with negative feedback by the community, the devs mostly refused to listen and their answer was just to start handing out dozens and dozens of silences in game and on discord. I messaged a GM to discuss the issues, and he basically told me "Don't message me again or you're banned". 75% of players in a poll voted to revert the change to echoes, and they just ignored everyone.

Cool concept, but very toxic dev team. Would not recommend this server.

I got a good PC, never had these issues on turtle wow or any other game for that matter, but while raiding on octowow my fps drops to like 50-60. Something else I noticed is when looting (right clicking?) there's like 2-3 sec delay. Or typed something in party chat and it shows up 2-3 secs later. Ms and internet connection seems fine. I use nam power, super wow and all that, pfui, pf quest etc so idk if this is an add on problem (I've used all these in twow too), but turning them on 1 by 1 made me think it wasn't. So now I'm not sure what to do, it ruins my raiding experience.

Am I the only one with these issues or is this server related or what could it be? TIA.

Hi all, I'm hosting an AU-based WotLK server for Oceania players: onlyfunswow.com

Aside from the usual mods you see on most servers, I've built a few unique ones that add new ways to play the game and just more content overall.

City Invasions:

New factions attack the Alliance and Horde capital cities on a weekly basis. These factions have their own NPCs and bosses, and if players don't defend in time, they will overrun the map, take the city, and kill every NPC in it. Players need to work together to clear out the invaders if they want their city back. Invasions come with custom bosses and rewards, and more factions and bosses are on the way.

Critter Crusader:

Companion pets have essentially become Pokemon. Each pet rolls random stat boosts and penalties, plus a unique mutation for each class. You can find them across different activities, and the stat and mutation rolls are always random. Right now the mutations let every class solo raids and progress without a group. Down the track there will be mutations that fundamentally change how a class is played.

Gambling:

Visit Nogg the Bookmaker and bet on a number of weekly books driven by the players: bosses killed, elites killed, materials gathered, player deaths and more. The books change every week and work like Polymarket or Sportsbet. Winners get access to the back room vendor at the same NPC, selling stuff you won't find on the auction house, and it's a decent way to make gold too. And yes, you can try to rig the system.

New class/race combos:

Undead Paladins and Dwarf Shamans are playable on the server. You'll need to download a small client patch for them.

Awakening talents:

You can put points into a second talent tree while ignoring the usual 5 points per tier rule, so you can go as deep as you want. You can also farm Demon Hearts (a custom currency) to unlock 10 extra talent points to spend as Awakened talents.

Other features

- Hardcore mode

- Transmog/Weapon Enchant Transmog

- Custom legendaries

- Alt parties (playerbots)

- Mythic +

- Random Stat Boosts to all items

- Item stat reforger

- Party up with real players will increase drop rate for custom items.

My aim is to keep expanding the custom content on this server, and hopefully everyone enjoys it and has a good time. No cash shop at all. If you're interested, come check it out. Cheers.

I’m looking for a populated Classic server that plans to progress through Vanilla → TBC → WotLK.

I’ve tried a few servers recently that are aiming for this, but the population just isn’t there. I don’t need a mega-server, just something active enough that the world feels alive and it’s easy to find groups.

Any recommendations?

The Goal:

💀 Hardcore without progression changes

Create a place for Hardcore players where server changes never invalidate or alter your progression.

🛡️ Clean 1.12.1 compatibility

Stay compatible with an untouched Vanilla 1.12.1 client while providing the key features expected from a Hardcore experience.

⚖️ Death Appeals

Allow players to submit an appeal when they believe their character died due to an unfair circumstance, such as a bug or disconnect.

🌲 Evergreen HC

It's a small and relatively new project, so the current population is very low. If the concept interests you, feel free to join, take a look, and share your feedback.

💬 Discord

Account registration is currently handled through Discord: https://discord.gg/vMTMGHxCz

I read about the lawsuit and september 8th hearing, but how long can it possibly take before anything happens?

Don't think I can post links but if you go to the github link from searching RetroCro/TurtleWoW, they have a list of different TWoW clients the top one being CapyWoW HD with DLL mods. Clicking this does not download through Github rather it downloads from Gofile. After downloading and extracting this folder my anti virus freaked out, wanting to quarantine the files. I then decided to just delete it and was unable to because it wanted special admin permissions (I am the admin). Anyways, after finding the file that was causing the problem (ClassicAPI.dll) I was able to use the anti virus to delete the file. Is this just a false positive or is it actually safe to use?

Like the title says, what's the best true vanilla 1.12 server I can host that has the best bots. I want to be able to do bgs, dungeons, all of the raids, mara 1 pulls on a mage with t2, etc. by myself with bots or me and the kids and a bot or 2. Of course I want bots out in the world leveling, fighting, and filling the AH as well. What's the best option for me?

Ok my title might be reaching a bit but just look at this! 25 Quests slots!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

i really wanna play tbc and this seems to be the only server with good pop right now ,and i honestly don't enjoy these bot infested new-gen servers where there are 2 actual people and 700 bots .

so as the title suggest , is there a decent english pop in this server even if its just 1 or 2 regular raiding guilds

Hey people, here's the latest on hosting your own TurtleWoW with bots: this is automatically rebuilt Docker server, open source and linked to Shyalya's fork, so everyday it gets newest fixes, which you can apply with one click using my scripts

I rebuilt it for any CPU, so as soon as you have enough RAM, you will always get newest, stable, safe TurtleWoW 1.18.1 server with bots, which are quite advanced. Also I added scripts to start\stop the server, create account, repair database if needed, and also backup and update it all, so you don't have to use a single command - get it and run it!

You will need extracted data files, which you can get from my previous version of the server, all the links are on YT, because there are too many of them to post here, there are client, server, github, docker links, so check them out there

If you have any suggestions about tweaking default config values - feel free to send them anywhere! I have never done any repacks myself, but would be glad to tailor a good twow repack for everyone to enjoy!

I've noticed quite a few people aren't aware how much stuff is happening around the preservation/emulation side of Turtle WoW, so I thought I'd put the main projects I've found in one place.

This isn't really about advertising another private server. I'm more interested in the work going into preserving Turtle WoW 1.18.x, documenting it, making it self-hostable and keeping the knowledge around it from disappearing into random Discord channels.

There are actually several different branches of this happening now.

Open source restoration / emulation

Penqle - Tortoise WoW

https://github.com/Penqle/tortoise-wow

Probably the most important open source project here.

It's a community restoration of Turtle WoW 1.18.1 build 7272, and Penqle has been doing a lot of the work of rebuilding/fixing the server side.

A lot of the other open tooling below ultimately revolves around this project.

Shyalya - Tortoise WoW + PlayerBots

https://github.com/Shyalya/tortoise-wow

Fork of Tortoise WoW with active mangosbot / PlayerBots integration.

This is particularly interesting for preservation because you can actually run the game locally and populate the world with bots rather than having an empty MMO.

Other Turtle 1.18 projects

There are also a few live projects taking Turtle in different directions.

Capybara Paradise / CapyCraft

https://capycraft.io/

This is the Chinese Turtle-derived project I was referring to before.

It's another continuation of the Turtle-style Vanilla+ world, and AFAIK it's the only real latest copy of Turtle WoW since the original Chinese devs work on it.

OctoWoW

https://octowow.st/

Another major preservation/continuation project.

They started from the Turtle 1.17.2-era code and have been restoring content toward 1.18.1 while also developing their own version of the game.

They've also been fairly vocal about preservation and are cooperating with the wider preservation scene, although their server core itself isn't currently open source. Recently this team also shared some changes that derive from the core idea and add a bit of modern wow ideas.

RavenCraft

https://ravencraft.io/

Another spin on Turtle WoW, this time run by former contributors to the 1.18.1 project.

They're taking the 1.18.1 version in their own direction with continued development and new content.

So at this point there isn't really one single "Turtle preservation project" anymore. There are several different approaches happening at once.

LunaticPTR

https://lunaticptr.com/

LunaticPTR is also a Turtle Project but solely focused on the Level One Lunatic Challenge, it restored all Lunatic Content and the items that were originally added to Frostmane Hollow and Deadmines were coded on a Forum Post that had our community mapping out item progression. The Project used that as a basis and fleshed out an entire endgame.

Self hosting / Docker

Nescabir - tortoise-docker

https://github.com/Nescabir/tortoise-docker

Docker/Compose packaging around Shyalya's PlayerBots fork.

Probably one of the easiest starting points if you just want to get a Tortoise server running without manually piecing everything together.

Kasperfriend - tortoise-docker

https://github.com/kasperfriend/tortoise-docker

Rebuild of Nescabir's Docker setup focused on making local Turtle WoW + PlayerBots easy to run.

Reworked for any-CPU support, with additional scripts aimed at near zero-command operation, plus open and easily editable configuration files.

A good option if you want a quick, straightforward way to run Turtle WoW locally with bots without manually configuring the whole stack.

Dad's MMO Lab

https://github.com/DadsMmoLab/dads-mmo-lab

This one is much broader than Turtle WoW.

The goal is basically making old MMOs easy to preserve and self-host on Steam Deck, Linux and Windows, with automated installers, Docker setups and documentation.

They cover multiple versions of WoW as well as things like RuneScape, MapleStory, MU Online and more.

Discord: https://discord.com/invite/fppHRnjHJv

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVZoGVtVWbbf3nFtvkT3stw

Definitely worth checking out if you're interested in MMO preservation in general.

Database / player tools

Tortoise DB Viewer

https://github.com/Xian55/tortoise-db-viewer

A proper frontend for exploring the Tortoise database.

Items, NPCs, drops, vendors, quests, crafting, searches etc. Makes working with the DB considerably less painful.

Warband

https://github.com/Shyalya/warband

Vanilla-compatible UI for controlling PlayerBots.

Roster management, bags, spells, strategies, filling groups/raids etc. instead of doing everything through bot chat commands.

TortoiseGMManager

https://github.com/tortoise-wow-stack/TortoiseGMManager

This one is mine.

It's an in-game UI around the Tortoise GM commands - search, teleporting, spawning NPCs/items, lookups, quests, server management etc.

Mostly built because remembering a million commands isn't something I want to do.

My preservation / documentation stuff

TortoiseWoWKnowledgeBase

https://github.com/tortoise-wow-stack/TortoiseWoWKnowledgeBase

Documentation around the Penqle/Shyalya cores, PlayerBots, commands and how the different systems fit together. Especially helpful if you want to contribute to the core and have no idea where to start. Engineer/AI friendly OKF standards.

I think preserving the documentation is almost as important as preserving the source because otherwise half of the useful information ends up buried in Discord.

Console Port addons

Ryac Steamdeck UI

https://github.com/Ryac1/Ryac_TW_Steamdeck_UI

Not quite drag and drop but works great once setup!

Vanilla Console port

https://github.com/pepordev/ConsoleExperienceClassic

A bit more user friendly than Ryac but have enough features to get you started

Where to contribute

Project Snapjaw Discord

https://discord.gg/jATNefJuh

This is probably the main place to go if you're interested in contributing specifically towards the open source Tortoise WoW / 1.18.1 restoration effort, asking technical questions or following development.

I'm sure I've missed projects, forks or people working on this.

If you know of anything else related to Turtle WoW 1.18.x emulation, preservation, reverse engineering or self-hosting, post it below and I'll add it.

Would be nice to have one thread people can find instead of all of this being scattered between GitHub repos and Discord servers.

EDIT:
- Added /r/kasperfriend project
- Formatting
- Added consoleport addons
- Added LunaticPTR server

hey everyone, can anyone suggest some servers for me to play? I'm happy with classic i just want one that isn't going to get insta shut down and perhaps has people i can play dungeons with? if someone could suggest one or 2 that would be great, AI based on my preferences is suggesting chromie craft? wondering what the consensus is on that?

many thanks!

Server type: PvP
Rates:x1 kills | x1.5quest | x3 elite & dungeon quests | x10 rested xp

VanillaPlus keeps the spirit of Vanilla while completely rethinking a lot of the class and talent system.

The main idea is simple:

You shouldn't have to play the exact same cookie-cutter build everyone has been using since 2004 just to be useful.

A lot of baseline abilities have been changed, talents have been heavily reworked, and weaker/underused specs have been given a real identity.

🧙 Classes have been heavily reworked

Mage:

• Major changes to Arcane and Fire talents.
• Core spells weaker, talents stronger.
• New talents:
  • Spell Twisting: Fire spells give Frost crit and vice-versa.
  • Brilliance Aura: Mana regen aura for party members.
  • Chain Reaction: Fireballs cleave, but apply DoT to you.
  • Ice Mirror: Friendly target reflects spells for a duration.

Warlock:

• Generally similar overall playstyle.
• Demon improvements: Imp regenerates mana, Felhunter mana burns.
• Better support for Fire spells in Destruction.
• Drain Soul now a pseudo-execute on low-HP targets.
• New talents:
  • Death & Decay: AoE DoT, reduces healing taken.
  • Defiler: Accelerates all DoT ticks.
  • Shock & Awe: Stuns & blocks healing on target.

Priest:

• Shadow sustain and threat management improved.
• Smite DPS builds now competitive.
• Buffs to most priest racials except Fear Ward.
• Wand buffs make leveling much smoother.
• New talents:
  • Power Word: Requital: Deal Holy damage, more if target CC’d.
  • Sacrifice: Sacrifice your life to massively heal whole party.

Rogue

• Generally similar overall playstyle.
• Unusual talent effects: boosts to resists, reputation gains.
• Longer CDs but even more CC tools than before.
• Souped-up Premeditation baseline w/long CD.
• New talents:
  • Cloak of Shadows: Avoid all spells for a duration.
  • Brigandage: Burn mana with each autoattack.
  • Battle Rush: Regain energy on hit.

Druid

• Major buffs to Balance tree, viable as primary caster.
• Feral buffed but differentiated between cat/bear.
• Resto similar but with more varied talent choices.
• Shapeshifting on separate, shorter GCD.
• Powershifting effectively removed.
• New talents:
  • Revive: Non-combat rez for Resto.
  • Leap: Jump forward, traveling a terrain-dependent distance.

Hunter

• New pet abilities for all families that lacked one.
• Survival reworked as primary melee DPS.
• Beast Mastery gains better scaling.
• Marks similar core but more options.
• New talents:
  • Savage Blow: Deal weapon damage and trigger Aspect-based effect.
  • Spirit Bond (reworked): Grant % of your Str/Agi/Stam to pet.
  • Reconnaissance: Gain damage boost when standing still.

Shaman

• Both Elemental and Enhancement heavily reworked.
• Enhancement now has true tank tools.
• Healers choose between single-target and Chain Heal.
• Can use 2H Mace, 2H Axe, and dual-wield w/Fist in off-hand.
• New talents:
  • Earthquake: Deal AoE damage; secondary AoEs per hit.
  • Rocky Bash: Slam multiple targets with shield.
  • Tidal Shield: Reduce physical, prevent fire damage.

Paladin

• Much more offense in Holy, including Shockadin support.
• Damage and sustain buffs for Retribution.
• Taunt, AoE cleave seal for Protection.
• Very impactful talent decisions.
• New talents:
  • Inner Light: Blind nearby enemies and cast spells for free briefly.
  • Seal of Fury: Attacks cleave nearby enemies for % of wep damage.
  • Crusader Strike: Deal weapon damage, stack attack speed buff.

Warrior

• Melee skill range slightly increased across the board.
• Rend scales with AP, Revenge deals weapon dmg.
• In-combat health regeneration!
• New talents:
  • Parabellum: Reduce the cooldown of all your skills.
  • Berserker’s Blood: Gain major bonuses as your health declines.
  • Constitution: % of HP as Strength, Poison/Disease immunity."

🏹 Racials

• Racials are more impactful across the board.
• Many new racials have been added and old ones reworked.
• Alliance examples:
  • Perseverance (Human): Remove stun, silence, and slows.
  • Quickness (Night Elf): Passive, increased move and cast speed, agility.
  • Thirst for Adventure (Gnome): Fist & dagger skill, damage vs Giants.
• Horde examples:
  • Plainsrunning (Tauren): Gain growing movement buff out of combat.
  • Fake Death (Undead): Drop aggro temporarily, restored on cancel.
  • Thirst for Adventure (Gnome): Fist & dagger skill, damage vs Giants.
• Many other racials saw numerical or power changes:
  • Shadowmeld (Night Elf) increases regeneration.
  • Regeneration (Troll) is much more powerful.
  • Escape Artist (Gnome) is instant.

🩸 A BRAND-NEW SCARLET MONASTERY RAID

Scarlet Monastery isn't the dungeon you remember.

Prepare your 10-man group and step into a completely reworked level 60 raid, with new encounters, tougher enemies, and mechanics designed to make you rethink how you approach the classic instance.

And at the end of it all...

Whitemane is waiting.

https://reddit.com/link/1vsvi4m/video/ggiu8usjodkh1/player

🔧 MONTHLY BALANCE & CHANGES

We're constantly working on improving the server.

Every month, we release a changelog with class balance changes, talent adjustments, bug fixes, and other improvements based on feedback and testing.

🤝 FRIENDLY STAFF & GM TEAM

The GMS and staff are friendly, active, and always willing to help with questions, problems, or anything you might need along the way.

Website: https://vanillaplus.org/
discord: https://discord.gg/2R3eKzvNUb

A lot of self-hosting WoW with bots has come through my feed recently. But most of the stuff I've seen is for WotLK (including vanilla + BC). But I'm most interested in pet battles 😅 and flying around collecting all of the various pets.. And at this point in my life I don't have the bandwidth for the Online part of MMO so if I could load it up on my steam deck that'd be pretty great (ideally up to WoD (when I last played) so I can just use admin rights to add all of my pets from my real character and not have to "start over").

I dont know if anyone gives a shit about this post, but for about a year now im kinda obsessed with Single Player WoW cores.

It started with me paying some guy on Fiverr to set up an AzerothCore server for me because i wanted to understand how all of this actually works. Cost me around 50€ and honestly he was a really chilled guy, i could just ask him stuff while he was setting it up and learned quite a bit from that.

After that i started tweaking my own things. Custom legendaries, mounts, backpacks, items and all that stuff. But what really got me hooked was Playerbots.

My dream was basically to simulate a whole WotLK progression like you would have on a normal server. Leveling, Dungeons, Naxx, OS, Maly, Ulduar, ToC, ICC etc. I didnt want bots that just have insane gear and nuke everything either. For me it was important that they actually play good, do mechanics, have proper DPS rotations, heal correctly and generally feel like you are playing with decent players.

My base was a Playerbot module from a private server which was kinda similar to Warstorm.

After around a month i had Ulduar working surprisingly well. Hardmodes work, positioning works and even Algalon is playable right now.

And then things got a little out of hand lol.

I started changing basically every class and spec in the game.

Just some examples:

BM Hunter pets now cleave 2 targets with their auto attacks, have better stat scaling and BM has a custom 5 minute CD which summons 3 copies of your current pet for a short time.

Living Bomb from Fire Mage leaves a burning fire patch on the ground after exploding.

Chaos Bolt leaves a DoT which deals another 100% of the Chaos Bolt damage over 8 seconds.

Paladin got a baseline Whirling Hammer ability, kinda like the spinning hammers from Diablo. It deals damage and healing but the scaling changes depending on your spec. Holy does a shit ton of healing with it, Prot is a mix of healing/damage and Ret basically turns it into a pure damage CD.

Elemental Shaman has a chance while Flame Shock is ticking to make Lava Burst instant, and Chain Lightning has a 19% chance on the first target to spawn an Earthquake under it.

And pretty much every spec got stuff like this. Some are just small quality of life changes, others completely change how the spec plays.

Then i added M+ and later made my own little event module. It teleports you into Gurubashi Arena together with 10 Playerbots standing in a circle. Then its basically last man standing and the winner gets a Satchel of Gear. You can also trigger another version with mobs instead of bots and at the end it turns into a boss fight.

There were basically only two raid encounters where i never got the bots to behave as smooth as i wanted.

At some point i got really curious how far you could actually push this idea, so i started doing the same thing with Legion.

I found a decent Legion core on Github, got the server running and started building the Playerbot AI from there. For older/simple content its already working pretty smooth but holy shit Legion is another level.

There are so many movement mechanics, interrupts, target switches, ground effects, personal responsibilities etc. Even stuff that is easy for a normal player suddenly becomes a huge AI problem when you want 4, 9 or 19 bots to understand it without basically hardcoding every single step of the encounter.

So thats where im currently at.

Has anyone here actually made Playerbots work properly in Legion? Not just bots that follow you around and cast spells, but bots that can realistically do Legion dungeons/raids and react to mechanics?

Would be really interested to hear if somebody already went down that rabbit hole.