What patch will Blizzard use for WoW The Burning Crusade Classic?

Blizzard Entertainment revealed it will be releasing The Burning Crusade Classic as the first expansion of its vintage WoW content this year, and while an abundance of questions followed, one stands above the rest.

What version of the game will we be playing?

All World of Warcraft expansions experience large amounts of class tuning and hotfixes, but when producing vintage content, Blizzard doesn’t have to make constant changes. They can find a patch in the game that will display the expansion in its most complete form. 

For TBC, that is the final patch of the expansion. Blizzard will release TBC with the balancing of patch 2.4.3.

As soon as the pre-patch for TBC Classic begins and players get access to Blood Elves and Draenei, players will see their class tuning, talents, and experience move to what they were in 2.4.3.

The immediate impact during the pre-patch will be a smoother leveling experience for players that want to get their new race characters from 1-60 before stepping through the Dark Portal.

In Patch 2.3, a change was made that decreased the amount of experience needed to level, making it so that to get from 1-60 you needed 3,379,400 experience. That was down 705,300 from vanilla WoW.

Meanwhile, an area-of-effect damage nerf that came through during TBC could prevent Mages from boosting characters at that time. So there’s a high likelihood you’ll see hundreds of Blood Elves running through the barrens.

Not everything will use patch 2.4.3 though. The use of that patch for TBC does not mean every raid will be available right from the onset of the game. End-game content will be released on its own separate schedule that is spread across five phases.

At the same time Blizzard engineer Brian Birmingham told reporters that even though we’ll be playing on patch 2.4.3, players should be prepared to do attunements for raids, even if they’re slightly nerfed.