WoW Classic’s Season of Discovery has been a chaotic, but overall impressive experiment, all told. While it’s had its speed bumps when it comes to grappling with older server tech and designing its world PvP, it’s also got that harebrained vibe usually reserved for private servers and the like. Tanking rogues, healing mages—spaghetti is meeting the wall at an unprecedented pace.
In case you’re unfamiliar, Season of Discovery takes the framework of Classic WoW and throws in a bunch of spice to shake things up, delivering its content in phases that are more akin to the seasons of Diablo 4.
Each season, the level band gets a little higher and more runes—gear modifiers you have to do certain quests or tasks to unlock—are added. Each class will be getting six or more runes this time around, which is around 54 new flavours of weird total.
For this phase, the Sunken Temple has been chosen to be elevated into a 20-player raid. As shown earlier in the month, it also comes with bespoke loot unique to Season of Discovery, such as an axe that’s also a gun. A gun axe, if you will.
Since the Sunken Temple has lore links to the Green Dragonflight, the Emerald Dream is also fittingly on the fritz. Nightmare Incursions make use of the portals to the Dream scattered across WoW Classic—which allow players to venture inside, fighting in a “realm seeping with corruption and overrun with dragons, treants, and other poor souls driven mad”.
The neat part? These incursions are available to players from levels 25 to 50, meaning they can be used to level up as well. As is Classic tradition, there’s also a rep grind involved. The Emerald Wardens faction will bestow upon you trinkets and armour with enough bonuses to keep the WoW forums arguing for a while. They’ll grant you one of your class runes, so you’d best start dreaming big.
As promised back in February, Season 3 also has an improved Discoverer’s Delight, giving players from levels 1 to 39 a 100% XP boost, and players from 40 to 49 a 50% XP buff—which all makes sense. Season of Discovery’s inherently less concerned with the long road to 60 of Vanilla WoW yore. If you’d prefer to go slow and steady, though, you can turn it off at an inn.
Phase 3 is live, so you can go and slay some imagined dragons right now, if you’d like. To access Season of Discovery, you’ll need an active subscription on a World of Warcraft account. Download Classic via the Battle.net app, make a character on the Season of Discovery realms, and you’re good to go.