ULTIMATE Hardcore Classic Class Picking Guide | Classic WoW

the hardcore challenge has taken vanilla World of Warcraft or by storm over the past few months and with official servers now well on their way I thought I put together a small video going into details of how each class performs during this challenge I've decided to start off with a class that's very close to my heart it is the first class I ever made in wow all those years ago and a class that has certain reputations some of them good some of them not so good the hunter as per usual I will eventually cover all classes in the game and will aim to break down their strengths and weaknesses as well as including tips to help you on your hardcore Journey such as talents important abilities to prioritize who are leveling weapon progression where relevant macros add-ons all that kind of stuff so let's make a start the hunter often seen as one of the most capable soloing classes in the game with a toolkit of CC consistent damage and a pet to ensure that you can sit comfortably 30 yards away from danger firing your bow it's also often the case that people recommend Hunter as a good class for newer players in general to World of Warcraft Just because they play so smoothly and safely yet whilst Hunter is easy to pick up I also believe it's the single higher skill cap class in the game with a pet control tons of mechanics you don't find on any other class in the game and the habits of making the player perhaps a little too confident going into dangerous situations there is a ton to talk about here so let's break down the hunter in hardcore wow coming in fresh to hardcore it's hard to not recommend having the hunter near the top of the list and it's the combination of having a very capable pet tank alongside a huge Auto attack range that really makes the hunter a very safe cluster level if you are taking things slow but just as I mentioned this class has a ton of Unique Mechanics that you need to be aware of for example drawing vanilla range door to attacks have a minimum of a yards and melee is 5 yards minimum so if an enemy is standing in that five to eight yard distance away from you you will be unable to attack them at all this is called The Dead Zone and a leveling Focus content tends to be less of a problem but there are still many mobs which can root with Nets or Frost and overs though try to avoid getting caught out and being unable to deal any damage melee and range swing timers are also separated in vanilla meaning if you are Min maxing you can have your pet hit one target with a second mob hitting you and then tap between them to rap to strike or just melee when it comes off of cooldown much more of a speedrun type thing to do but it is fun to pull off and we should talk about your pet too in classic it's not a Mindless Beast that you can just have exist next to you and forget about it your pet needs to be actively worked on just as much as your character does to start off with you don't get a pet until Level 10. and those first 10 levels can actually be quite painful as you want to access the wing clip to help kiting you will have concussive shot but generally don't overpole like crazy when you're going fresh out of your starter Zone once you do hit 10 and finish your pet Quest you will not have access to some of the core abilities to maintain your pet such as revive pet V pet and Beast training you will need to venture to your near faction capital city to pick these up and when you tame your first pet they are not going to be very happy and if their happiness goes a low enough or they will just straight up run off so make sure your pet doesn't die before you finish this Quest or just go get it done as a priority you will also want to feed your pet to increase its happiness each pet eats different food which you can check via the pet tab under your character IAT is a food give more happiness and you should be feeding on food which is roughly the same as their level this directly boosts the damage that they deal as well as causing your pet to gain loyalty what's a loyalty you ask well it's a stat that determines how much your peter likes you and it's a stat that you want to max out on your main pet as time pass classes and you gain experience your pet's a loyalty level increases it looks like a kind of bluish color ding animation when it goes up and it caps out at level six this in turn will give you more training points to spend on your pet the water training points then this is a number determined by your pet's or level as well as loyalty you can choose what to spend them on by opening your Beast training tab in your Spellbook this will show you all your learned ranks of abilities to train your pet with now some of these abilities are learned directly from a pet trainer who are found next to your class trainers these are generally speaking your defensive abilities such as extra armor spell resistances growl and so on oh by the way you get a new rank of growl every 10th level and you should go learn it as soon as possible it's also the only trained ability that costs zero training points too but if you want to learn new offensive moves you have to do it through taming beasts out in the wild some pets when tamed will have new ranks of abilities or abilities that you haven't learned yet at all the so if I just hit Level 40 and wanted to teach my pet bike to rank 6 I would have to run around the world spamming BEAST's law on random animals until it saves one of them knows this ability or you know you can just use Petopia like a normal person and look at which beasts have it you then have to stable your main pet to go train a beast which has your desired ability or Rank and then have them use this ability in front of you and eventually you as in the hunter will learn this technique and it will appear in your Beast training Spellbook you then abandon this pet that taught you the ability or I mean you can keep it if you want and go get your main pet back out the stable and teach them the new rank using training points I don't know how this makes sense but that is the system that exists it's not totally obvious how it works so I thought I'd just explain that I'll talk more about pets to use during the talents part of the video in case you wanted to hear about that oh and of course don't forget about stocking up on ammo when in town either your general Goods vendors will have some for sale with that out there way how does the hunter perform solo well for me Hunter is without a doubt the single best class in the game for soloing mobs which are higher level than you not even Elites necessarily just stuff that's a higher level and it's not because of their pet though the pet does help a lot admittedly it's because ranged attacks are kinda busted and classic actually or any of a class in the game orange mobs can be a challenge and rad mobs are just straight up not worth the risk for the hunter if you have space to run it's all fair game this is because ranged attacks cannot be parried dodged or blocked they either miss or they hit but when you're attacking something a higher level you're rolling against way fewer failure points on their defense table compared to melee classes who will have a hard time Landing attacks or spell casters who will have most of their spells partially or entirely resist when you add on aspect to the cheater and concussive shot to this you become literally impossible to catch meaning as long as you can keep hitting whatever it is and running they will go down eventually this can be useful for solving Elites at a lower level than normal picking off name mobs which are way higher level than anything else in the area or rare mobs which tend to be a lot stronger than your standard mobs too but even if you aren't testing the limiting going for quests whichever classes wouldn't be able to do Hunter is just an absolute Powerhouse of a solo class low down time thanks to the bulk of your damage coming from Auto shots in your pet good consistent damage super long attack range aspect to the cheetah from level 20 which gives you 30 bonus movement speed up to 36 percent talented this makes a huge difference in the cardio simulator that vanilla questing is and so much more so for the solo player that wants something pretty chill to the speedrunner looking to min max Hunter mechanics you really can't go wrong with this class in a group The Hunter is near enough always a solid addition for kind of the same reasons that they Excel solo though in groups you may be called upon for some more utility though such as a frost or freezing trap to control groups of enemies or using Fleur to check for stealth mobs ahead of you your pet can very much be a blessing or a curse in group content from weird pathing leading them to pulling extra mobs pets with Dash on getting feared into different rooms and of course the classic Hunter please turn off taunt moment then again you have the possibility of having an off tank pulling large groups of enemies with either the Beast and more experienced Hunters compared to those newer to the class will become noticeable in groups by really taking advantage of their full toolkit instead of kind of just chilling at the back and pressing Auto shot the Hunter's survivability is kind of a weird one I don't think it's as amazing as people make it out to be and when things go wrong which eventually they will you may not be well equipped to deal with it first up though there's the big ability I've got to mention Fane death this might just be the single best defensive spell in the entire game 30 second cooldown instantly removes you from combat and completely drops you from the threat table it is just overpowered in hardcore this is the I win button of the defensive category but there are a few things to say about it all the same it can be resisted specifically against higher level mobs or when you're pulling multiple mobs this is not uncommon at all and it really is a single point of failure if Bane flops you can be in big trouble second issue don't get feign until Level 30. that is a lot of levels and the early game is when a majority of players die because they don't have their classes full toolkit you're going to be doing some of the most dangerous levels in the game without your best stability which can be quite tough other things to take into account with survivability are weapon skill and defense you need to train your active melee weapon it's not just a stat stick if a mob gets on you and Wing clip gets parried and dodged six times in a row you're gonna feel bad about that also being Hunter and range your defense skill is not very likely to be capped for your level because you need to be getting hit for it to go up the uh simple way I guess to think about this is if your defense skill is 15 or more levels alone lower than it's possible count at any given level a mob the same level as you will be able to hit you with crushing blows which deal 150 percent of normal damage as opposed to if your defense is capped for your level a mob would have to be three levels higher than you in order to land a crushing blow I just thought I'd mention this in case you're wondering why you're taking so much damage when leveling a hunter on Hardcore I've even received crushing blows from mobs a lower level than me because my defense has been leveled up that little oh and one more thing about survivability before level 40 you have to use a leather instead of male which of course provides way less armor either way Hunters are well equipped to survive tough situations just make sure you don't rely entirely on feign death and level your melee weapon up next up how fast is this class 2 level up on well it is vanilla so whatever you're doing it is going to be a long old grind but the hunter is absolutely up there among some of the speediest levelers in the game most notably I think this class is a faster leveler even for somebody who isn't trying super hard to min max with pulling multiple mobs melee weaving or anything like that low down time and aspects of the cheetah from an early level are a big deal whilst others have to stop and drink the hunter keeps going and going now I want to talk about talents and pets pets first so are there any specific ones which you should be using honestly I don't think it's a super big deal and the differences are minor between pets if I had to choose I would go for a bird they have access to Screech which causes minor damage to your main target and reduces the attack power of all nearby enemies allowing their damage by a small amount they can also get dive which is just your pet's version of Sprint to get them between targets faster which I think is very useful saying that not everyone's starter Zone has access to getting Birds early but everyone can get a cat quite early on at so good as they attack fast can learn by torclaw as well as Dash and if you go down the route to beast mode history ideally you do want a fast hitting pet for better up time on the frenzy talent worth a mention in case anyone out there is lucky enough to see him there is a totally unique rare spawn level 36 cat in the Badlands called broken tooth this cat for some reason has won attack speed which is the fastest in the entire game out of All Pets meaning this cat is amazing for frenzy uptime you will be permanently camped and tamed on spawn but if you run across him might be worth picking up at the end of the day the differences are quite small and I think the pet is up to you and what you want most you think plain Striders are cool you go get a playing Strider you like turtles go tame a turtle now let's get on to talents so as a quick mention Marksman is a good tree for dealing damage but early game you're going to be doing too much damage and kiting mobs more so than having your pet tanking them also you're gonna have Mana problems and a squishy pet survival is not half bad either but it also runs into the squishy pet issue whilst also having more supportive talents rather than the big gameplay enhancing ones that we want early game so for me this is why the hunter more or less has to go down the Beast Mastery tree it's just got too many good things going for it it beats up your pet AKA your own personal walking tank a good amount extra movement speed on aspects of the cheetah really adds up over time and passive movement on your pet from best your swiftness is also very useful before you get Dash or dive heading down into the tree you can get intimidation which is a stun and a big threat modifier for your pet this is the only way you can interrupt spellcast so that is really good to have or out of five on frenzy is fine 80 chance is more than good enough with how often your pet will be critting and then we go down to the bottom of the tree into bestial wrath a two minute cooldown 50 extra damage increase and Immunity to a bunch of different effects for 18 seconds on your pet really good cooldown you can fire off a regularly while leveling allowing your pet to mow through multiple mobs like they are nothing but maybe this is a good standard Beast Mastery build some people go and prove revive pet instead of aspect of the Hulk but I prefer to try and not let my pet die and just deal more damage up to you at level 40 where you go next is down to preference as a rule of thumb Marksman is for damage the Bible is for utility the points you'll spend in Marksman are pretty meta and not really flexible all of these are quite key in terms of saving mana and dealing extra damage you also get AIM Shot 2 which in classic is a big long cast which can cause some serious damage watch your threat on this one alternatively I think going into survival does make a lot of sense on a hardcore character I would probably be inclined to do this myself to be honest it's more so about living not just maximizing your damage now for this subspec I think a lot more of it does come down to preference I've gone full into entrapment because I like the talent it can chain proc several times in a row meaning sometimes mobs get stuck in a frost trap for over 10 seconds I've gone into survivalists for more health and deterring for another defensive cooldown two points them to improve Fame death and one into trap Mastery should dramatically reduce the chance either of these spells resist keep in mind though all spells will always have a one percent chance to resist no matter how much hit you have I spent the final two talents on sure-footed mainly for the two percent hit I would also consider clever traps to synergize with entrapment better so those are your talents now we have abilities because you don't just go to the shop and click buy everything abilities are really expensive and you need to be saving for your Mount also some of them might not be totally worth it I've tried to color code the Hunter's ability toolkit here green are the ones I would prioritize whenever I have the chance to level them up yellow is either optional or I wouldn't level them fully because the goal cost at Max rank is kind of high such as for Wing clip or distracting shot and red are the ones which I think you could avoid spending gold on until you have the gold to spare also wherefore mentioned tranquilizing shot is from atome in molten core so you won't learn it when you're level 60 but you will pick it up when you have the chance to do so the key abilities you will use more than anything else will be Hunters Mark serpent sting an Arcane shot I take track hidden and always keep her active because it increases your stealth detection which can help on certain quests reminder that all traps share a cooldown and Frost and freezing trap tend to be useful most of the time immolation trap and rap to strike are both good damage dealing abilities worth leveling they just start to get kind of expensive at high ranks and I'd have to think twice about it similar story with distracting shots I do think it's an underrated ability it doesn't taunt in vanilla as it does in Wrath but it causes a large amount of threat which sometimes can keep your pet alive as a mob tries to run to you either way these are just my thoughts on what I would level of course if I was grouping consistently or running as a duo or Trio I would pick up aspect of the pack straight away and consider explosive Trap 2 for example though take it with a grain of salt as for what fits you and how you play the game now I want to talk about weapons for hunters so despite being a physical damage dealing class and then typically valuing weapons a lot if you're going down the Beast Mastery tree it's not the biggest deal in the world to have an amazing weapon Baseline you only have one attack Modified by your weapon speed which is multi-shot but you're not going to be using this a ton while leveling due to its high Mana cost on top of that a big chunk of your damage will be coming from your pet all the same don't discount just straight up buying common quality bows from a vendor as good Quest rewards are quite success but if you did want some quests here they are keep in mind these quests can be started at an earlier level than mentioned but very much at your own risk at around level 14 hordes can do Centaur braces in the Barons for an orcish battle though a level 16 Alliance can do a hunter's boast in eastern lock modan rewarding Ivory bow or a gun a while later at level 29 there are powerful upgrades for both factions behind quite tricky quests the alliance have almost revenge in the wetlands which gives Raptors end and the final part of the sacred flame quest for hoarding 1000 needles Awards a good bow too the next big upgrade has to be from Big Game Hunter around level 43 or so this is the final part of nesting where he's Quest chain to bring in the head of King banglash very soluble as a hunter just remember to stun him around 50 to prevent ads from spawning at level 51 also your big first end game weapon to look out for is verdant Keeper's aim from Corruption of Earth and Seed this involves defeating princess theradras and maridon so it will be challenging and is a dungeon Quest but is a weapon that will last you for a very very long time also don't forget to upgrade your quiver or ammo pouch this both allows you to carry more ammo as well as passively increasing your ranged attack speed at level 10 go by a medium quiver from a vendor and at level 30 a heavy quiver or whatever the gun variant is progression kinda caps out here if you aren't a level worker either way you should definitely be doing this next macros and add-ons and I'll be keeping it specific to what I would get on Hunter add-on wise for Hunter I've always got to have a swing timer there is a wind-up time when you go to shoot your ranged weapon knowing when this is for kiting or just moving in in general is really useful I would also consider some kind of threat meter such as details tiny threat or modern Target frame which adds a threat number to the top of enemy's portraits your pet is going to be tanking most of the time you're going to be second on threat having a good idea when you're going to be taking aggro is pretty useful not super necessary of course but it can be nice macros now if you want any they'll be in the description cast Auto shot so this makes it so you cannot toggle your auto shot on or off and you can spam the button I don't know how people play Hunter without this wait until you see how easy it is to toggle Auto shot on and off by mistake and then come and get this macro by far the one I use the most you can also throw a pet attack macro into your auto shot too so your pet will always be going after your main target I bind pet passive as well this just calls your pet back to you it's useful if mobs are running in fear towards other groups and you don't want your pet to chase you change your mind on sending your pet in you need to save your pet when it's on low health and so on and so forth speaking of passive I would generally keep your pet on passive or all of the time too defensive is okay but sometimes you're running away from mobs and you don't want your pet to be constantly hitting things and dragging them along with you also pet aggressive is keybinded by default unbind this seriously there will be that one time when somehow somewhere you turn it on you're gonna be in a dungeon and your pet will go zooming towards the repacks of Elites for me it was under keybinds action bar pet button 8 and it was on the bind control 8. this is one of the few abilities in the game where if you think you need it just click it cast Eagle Eye allows you to spam this ability without this you can only cast it once and then it will redirect you back to the player it's actually very useful for finding where mobs have spawned in a Zone when they have multiple spawns have you ever wanted to find fosric in arathi Highlands now you can do it without doing laps of the Zone start attacking Cass Raptor strike can be useful for a simple one button melee macro you can add in counter-attack or Mongoose bike 2 if you have them finally something here to feed your pet in one button just update the macro with whatever food you use and that is about all I have for the hunter definitely a class that can be great for all players whether you're just starting classic hardcore or you've been giving it a go for a while now it's in that unique place of both being super accessible but also having a really high skill cap to play optimally either way I hope you found some of the information here useful for your hardcore journey and if you decide to go with a hunter I don't think you will regret it foreign vanilla World of Warcraft was the only time when we had faction specific classes and it was such a huge thematic draw for players making that ever important decision of Alliance versus horde whilst the alliance received a light-wielding Warriors in the Paladin the hordes got powerful Elemental casters and spiritual leaders in the shaman whether you wanted to Global someone in PvP with elemental Mastery roll a dice each melee swing with wind Fury albeit a powerful healer with tons of utility the shaman answered all of those calls today we take a look at the shaman from a different angle though through the lens of the hardcore challenge which has much more focus on the leveling rather than the end game as always with plenty to cover here so let's check out the shaman in hardcore classic wow so is the shaman a good pick for a player taking on the hardcore challenge is this class new player friendly well I think the best way to put it is that they start out as one of the most powerful classes in the game during the early levels and then feel as a so they fall off quite hard during the latter parts of your leveling Journey as per the death log add-on which tracks deaths in hardcore to put out data the shaman shows some really interesting stats first of all they are the least played class which is not surprising considering their faction specific and as of this snapshot on June 9th they counted for only 2.3 percent of total deaths tracked what stands out though is how well the shaman does early game they have the best chance of hitting level 10 by an absolute Mile with about 72.6 percent of players making it to that Benchmark the next class in order is the Mage and they're around 65 percent German also has the highest average level of 14.6 meaning Shaman players are getting furthest in the hardcore challenge before making some kind of fatal error but you can see its levels progress things start to go downhill by level 20 their stats have become a lot more middle of the pack and by level 30 they are well below average so I guess in the way they are new player friendly if they have the highest average level possible but they're also more likely than most to fail the challenge during the latter parts of the game as to why they start strong and fall off later that's something we'll be answering during other parts of this video so how does the shaman perform solo questing reasonably well I would say with a true hybrid toolkit of melee spell casting self-heels and totems common often have the tools to take down challenges which other classes may find difficult it just depends whether the Mana bar can hold up long enough to actually finish the job moving from enemy to enemy in regular questing can be quite fast as long as you are playing in an efficient manner and making the most of your melee attacks you'll also find early game with instant cash shocks and weapon imbues that you power through enemies way faster than most classes will too German has to be one of the most fun classes to start off on the hardcore challenge with against elitequest performance may vary a bit more the good side is with those self-heals and the ability to carry forever with Frost Shock Shaman has the tools to overcome harder quests the problem is you're going to be reliant on your melee attacks to do a good portion of your damage and attacking a melee means you're going to be trading hits and even if you're going with a one-hander in a shield that's gonna hurt as you progress in levels I think you start to notice Shaman falling off in damage somewhat I feel as though it happens around sometime between levels 35 to 40. of course wind Fury is a great buff to get hold of at level 30 and so much fun to play with especially if you manage to get a slow two-handed weapon but it's just so RNG heavy the bonus attacks can still be dodged or parried and often it's just over killing mobs by a huge amount the other option for the melee Focus Shaman around this level is a one-hander in a shield though but your searing totem lightning shield and shocks have to play a decent part in your damage output instead perhaps then there is a level where it's time to move away from enhancement and maybe even play Elemental maybe we'll have to talk about that in talents grouping up is where the shaman can truly shine and the big bonus that they provide are totems Earth fire water and wind these group wide Buffs provide a whole host of different benefits from Manipur 5 Health per 5 resistances dispels reducing damage taken dealing damage adding the wind Fury effect to your party members mainhanded weapons and a lot more if you're playing a melee class on The Horde singer Shaman join the party is pretty much the best feeling you can have in the game I think the shaman is also one of the most flexible classes in the game during group based content well okay Elemental is very questionable early game due to missing a lot of vital talents but you can dps's enhancement just fine you can put on a bunch of intellect gear and fulfill a Healer roll and you can absolutely tank I know people meme enhance tank and treat it like it's not viable because of how it performs the 10 game but during leveling dungeons especially those low level dungeons it's actually very good enhancement might not have taunters Warriors or Druids do but her shock and rock bite to weapon both have Hefty fret modifiers attached to them which will make it difficult to pull a mob off a shaman once they've engaged it Stone claw into fire Nova can generate a ton of AOE threat if the Nova's able to go off garments can wear a shield of course and Baseline they take a few survivability focused talents in the enhancement tree anyway definitely don't underestimate the shaman tanks in early to mid-game dungeons they'll work just fine on to survivability then a topic where we have a bunch to say so Shaman starts strong and fall off and their ability to survive a situation going south is a big contributor to that simply put to despite having the largest toolkit of abilities in the entire game not too many of them are really overpowered when it comes to keeping you alive first up shamans have some really key aspects of gameplay locked behind Talon points Baseline you get Ghost War for level 20 which which increases movement speed by 40 percent Outdoors the problem it's a three second cast and even if there's just one enemy hitting you with spell knockback being a thing it's gonna be a struggle to get off a three second cast if you actually need to run away with seven points in the enhancement tree you can get it down to a one second cast which is fine you can fit that in between most enemies swing timer most people will be enhancement anyways but if you did want to play a different spec it feels like a near non-optional 7 Talent Point investment on a hardcore character another rather vital defensive tool which you don't get for a very long time and you don't get at all if you don't go enhancement is the ability to Parry for some reason you have to be level 30 before you can have the Talon point to invest in the ability to Parry every single of a class that Campari learns it from their trainer by level 10. Shaman enhancement only you need level 30 and you need a talent point the ability to Parry is a defensive tool you should not Overlook as well not only does it highly stop an enemy attack but it also allows you to strike them back faster thanks to Parry haste the fact that you don't get this to level 30 is just strange to be honest oh and also you're wearing leather armor until Level 40. that's just another way you're missing out on some vital passive mitigation for a class wearing leather you don't have the avoidance or CC of a rogue or the mobility and defensive tools of a druid you're kind of just standing there and getting hit in the face for a very long time perhaps the biggest kick for Shaman survivability are actually the totems do you think totems are only ever a positive but for your character or your group until you remember how totem's working classic once you put a totem down you cannot remove it unless it times out or you replace it with another totem from the same element there's no totemic recoil to quickly remove them like there is in TBC there's no totem bar to play several at once like there is in Wrath you put down one totem and that is it and this can be very problematic moments that which is where you have two totems down there's a Patrol coming and you don't have the manner to replace them so it ends up pulling the patrol and then you don't have the health to fight so you have to try and run away or the dreaded totem pole during a dungeon group just one errant totem could end up pulling mobs that spawn behind you or catch a patrol you didn't expect I remember drawing classic at some point there was a macro that you could use to remove totems and blizzard ended up breaking it because hashtag no changes oh yeah gotta be really careful with your totems as great as they can be they can absolutely cause a lot of problems but the shaman does have quite a few tools at their disposal to survive difficult situations they have Earth shock which both deals damage and can interrupt enemy spell casting for a short duration Rush shot can be used defensively to Kai tour control enemies indefinitely Stone floor totem taunts nearby enemies and absorbs a minor amount of damage good for when you pull multiple mobs by accident it will also frequently stun enemies which attack it fire totems themselves can be used as a small defensive troll when you summoned fire Nova for example it instantly generates a large amount of threat to nearby enemies it's a very minor thing but it could distract an enemy just long enough for you to get away grounding totem alongside Earth shot could make it difficult for enemies to land successful casts on Shaman at all you also have Purge which can remove enemy magical effects very efficiently and of course you have healing wave your Lassa healing wave all of those things all in all shamans do have tools to survive tough encounters there's just nothing that stands out as a huge button which will nearly guaranteed save you such as ice block or feign death the shaman is definitely a class where as you hit the higher levels you need to start playing more and more carefully on to speed though is this class Fast 2 level well the shaman may not have the same fast space leveling speed as some other classes but they have several advantages that can contribute towards efficient leveling they can fulfill multiple roles as a Healer DPS or even a tank and versatility is a great thing during leveling and allows you to see the full toolkit the shaman has to offer you also get to to be more than just a Healer which is often the experience at endgame though the shaman starts offered to fairly rapid Pace they do tend to fall off as you get to the higher levels leaving them somewhere in the middle of the pack when it comes to leveling speed on two talents then what kind of build are we looking at for the shaman so I don't think it's any secret but people tend to go enhancement at least during the early game on the shaman but if you did want to play Elemental is that really a thing and can it work well to be honest Elemental until you hit quite a high level is kind of just enhancement but worse simply put you're missing some really vital talents for a such a long time it's a talent tree so I can show you what I mean the first problem is having to go into the enhancement tree early game to pick up improved ghost wolf to make it somewhat useful second is the fact that the talent to reduce the cast time on your lightning bolts and chain lightning cannot be maxed out until as early as a level 39. every single other spellcaster in the game gets their cast speed reduction talents very early on because I mean it's kind of essential to playing a Caster but apparently not for the elemental shaman I mean if you do want to cast three second lightning bolts until nearly level 40 you do you but it's not gonna be for everyone you also don't have a good way to avoid spell knockback your talent eye of the storm has a 100 chance to make you immune to spell knockback after being hit by a physical crit for a few seconds this is great in PvP in PVE it's just not very useful ranged attacks can't cred in PVE and melee attacks quitting is just totally random also you're probably going to be wearing cloth because you're going to be needing the intellect and well you know classic itemization shamans are just not manner efficient in general and it feels as though they were meant to be meleeing whatever spec you're playing instead of being a pure spellcaster so the combination of probably having to wear cloth Armor 3 second lightning bolts and a no spell knockback prevention are what make Elemental just not very good until you hit around level 14. I think once you do have these town it's unlocked they do start improving noticeably they're still not super manner efficient but your damage output is extremely bursty which makes Elementals start to feel really satisfying to play and even if I did want to go Elemental on my Shaman I would still start off as enhancement save gear that would fit it in the bank and respect around level 40 or so but most people will be going enhancement so we've already talked about some of the benefits you get improved ghost wolf you get parry and beyond that you get to lean into the hybrid nature of Shaman to a much greater degree by combining both melee attacks shocks and totems to deal damage also you open up the opportunity to tank much more efficiently should you find yourself in that situation you can also learn the ability to equip two-handed weapons if you manage to find a good one out in the open world or as a drop from a dungeon Midway through the town tree you also get flurry causing your crits to increase your attack speed and adding a nice extra bit of damage onto your auto attacks the big ability rights at the bottom of the tree is Storm strike instantly attacking causing the next two sources of nature damage to do an additional 20 damage the best use you'll get out of this will be for an earth shock in group content this extra damage often gets used up by some random item procs or attacks from other players that deal nature damage the most fun thing about enhancement to me though has to be the moment when you first get access to win Fury after doing your air totem Quest at level 30. it gives each melee swing a chance to deal two extra attacks with bonus attack power this is kind of the vanilla enhancement Shaman's defining ability it's definitely a lot of fun but super high variants personally I got a little tired of wind Fury RNG by the higher levels but it's well worth using at least for a while or just in general if you manage to find a really good two-handed weapon blowing up on mob in one single hit will just never not be fun after spending points and getting storm strike in the enhancement tree it's kind of up to you where you want to go next you can go into Elemental putting points into improving the damage of your fire totems as well as picking up Elemental focus and element Devastation as nice as these talents are adding all like crit Synergy it really doesn't do much for the sorry state of the enhancement Shaman's already scare Samana bar I would usually instead go into restoration for a number of reasons you get a talent that gives bonus hit chance healing knockback prevention and it allows for more opportunity in general to flex into a Healer role for later game dungeons above all I'd try and find a shaman play style which you like it boils down to one-hander plus a shield two-hander or Elemental each have their own strengths and weaknesses and are quite different from one another so try them out and see what works for you next abilities so the ones highlighted in Greener level wherever possible yellow is optional or don't level fully and red is a void if you can say one thing about the shaman it's that they have by far the most abilities in the game and that's even before you get into down ranking and including more Niche use totems all the same whether you're playing Elemental enhancement or anything in between there's quite a few abilities that will always find their use such as healing wave lesser healing wave lightning bolts and chain lightning otem wise the majority of them are pretty useful and I level up ones including searing Stone skin Mama spring poison or disease cleansing Stone claw grounding earthbind and so on all of these are worth leveling up the more optional totems are the resistance ones wind wall and Sentry weapon and bui's are usually stick to wind Fury once I have it even if I'm playing Elemental as far as I know rock bites are in flame tongue are quite similar damage wise over a long period of time so I just pick one and stick with it the only possible avoids for The charminar Reincarnation and ancestral Spirits resurrecting not terribly good on Hardcore weapon progression is a funny thing to cover on the shaman more so than other classes you can lean into playing the drops you get across several different play Styles rather than there just being one set weapon path being the best without much discussion all the same of their work quests I would go out of my way to do I can think of three of them and they are all in dungeons your first big weapon upgrade on the shaman will near enough always be the Crescent staff from the quest to leaders of the Fang this staff has very good stats for the shaman as well as a decent attack speed and this weapon could easily take you from the early level 20s into the 30s it really is that good it can be nice to pick up a good shield on the shaman even if you're not always using it the quest eventual Fates which involves defeating the last boss of Razer fan crawl gives just that also the last boss can drop the prong to Reaver and as long as there isn't a warrior in a group or a hunter who thinks they need a strength weapon you will always get this on your Shaman even if you just get the shield off of this Quest it's nice to have but if you win the ax and then go turn in the Quest for the shield it's a massive upgrade over the Crescent staff and you'll find this combo useful for a very long time at a higher level it's worth getting the Resurgence rod from the quest Corruption of Earth and Seed which involves defeating princess their address in maradon it's okay from a Caster point of view giving eight Mana per five but mainly of interest if you want to see some big win Fury crit it's very slow 3.8 speed gives it high top end damage making it a weapon that can see you through towards end game finally let's cover some macrozone add-ons Earth shocks interrupt is the same at Max rank compared to rank 1. so having rank 1 just for a low-cost interrupt is very useful I've also added a stop cast macro and a mouse over function too so it goes off right away one button buffing is nice on the shaman you're going to be pressing lightning Shield a lot and weapon imbues for some reason only last 5 minutes other than that try and fit as many of your many many different totems somewhere on your bar where they're easy to remember in terms of add-ons for the shaman there's only one specific thing I tend to find helpful and that's getting a reminder via a weak horror or an add-on for my weapon and Views having them fall off for five minutes and thinking to yourself wow I'm getting unlucky with wind Fury today is all too real of a thing and that for me is the shaman in hardcore wow it's a class that proves very versatile across different roles stats are super strong and falls off a little towards like game the Druid whether you want to tank heal ranged or melee DPS this class was designed to be able to fill any role within World of Warcraft a true class for the person who likes to keep their options open when it comes to how they play the game whilst during the end game Druids tend to be pigeonholed into a Healer role or feral to a lesser extent during the leveling Journey there is a ton more flexibility and you really get to mix and match druid's talents abilities and gearing options the match what fits you the best as always with this class there's going to be plenty to cover so let's make a start on the Druid in hardcore classic wow starting off I would say the Druid is a solid pick for somebody beginning in hardcore wow but does have quite a unique learning curve to it in later versions of World of Warcraft where leveling is a lot more straightforwards than you get access to your forms at a low level the Druid is super strong classic doesn't quite work out like this who it feels as though it has three phases before you get birth form before you get cat form and after you get cat form each one is a milestone that will significantly change how you play the game and I kind of like that you know your starting items are literally called novices robe and pants and that's really what you are when you first log in a novice Druid who doesn't even understand how to do something so basic as to shift into a different form as we'll get on to later all Druids start primarily as spell casters but then go on to choose which path to go down as they level up it's kind of a nice additional bit of progression you don't quite get to the same degree with other classes aside from that they have a versatile toolkit with mobility tankiness and heels making for a powerful leveler and a very self-sufficient class so how does the Druid do solo kind of goes without saying they're pretty good at it although it will again depend on how you choose to play their class but kind of the beauty of the Druid assuming you're spending your manner on healing when needed and shape-shifting they have one of the lowest down times of all classes meaning you can keep going and going and as mentioned earlier droids really power up as they gain access to more forms and you should be doing these quest lines as soon as you can your bear form Quest will be unlocked at level 10 giving you both a powerful and durable melee form as well as the capability to start tanking group content don't forget to level 40 to go and train dire bear form from your class trainer as well get significantly more stats from their shape-shift you also get a quest for aquatic form as early as level 16 but it does involve a ton of traveling and going out of your way but do pick it up and get it done at some point your underwater breathing only lasts for one minute in classic and some of these underwater quests can be a pain without potions at level 20 you get cat form this is your big Power Spike and allows you to start tearing through mobs and Topping up with heel in between each pole finally at 30 is travel form a low Mana cost 40 boost to movement speed only usable Outdoors however though and both cats and travel form are just available from your class trainer instead of a quest because um I don't know reasons I guess blizzard ran out of time on these ones speaking of your class quests though cure poison is also from a level 14 Quest 2. it does need five Earth route to complete though which can make it a bit problematic on Hardcore depending whether we can trade or not but even if you aren't a herbalist earthroot is an uncommon drop from quite a wide range of mobs either way you get abolish poison at level 26 which is kind of like an improved version of this spell so up to you whether you want to go out of your way to do this if you're not playing solo as feral and instead of going the pure spellcaster route down balance Druids are definitely at more of a disadvantage due to having to spend all their Mana bar on damage rather than on heels and shape shifts they can do fine enough off when fighting outside where they can make the most of their tool kit but you better get used to the idea of spending about 50 percent of your time in combat and the other 50 drinking to get your Mana back up boomkins and classic are some very thirsty Druids we'll talk more about that later though as part of a group where The Druids can technically fill any role you would have high hopes for this class but it does tend to be the case in groups where the more versatile classes start to get outperformed individually by those who are specifically good at doing one thing I guess that's why it's called a group effort still drones bring innovate and Mark of the wild whatever spec you're playing I'd usually say rebirth is pretty good too but uh yeah not in hardcore I mean you can rebirth hunter pets if you want to it's as though Druids have brought all the other healers down to their level of capability with resurrex in hardcore so them not having a normal resurrect isn't even a downside anymore surely that's a positive right I would say most of the time though particularly if you have specked into 2 feral that it's pretty likely you are going to be asked to tank even without picking a few burst specific talents feral works just fine for Dungeon content and of course they're being classic with no dual spec or any quality of life you kind of just take the class that has the most capability to tank rather than somebody who is actually specialized into doing it feeling wise in a group you should not be expected to be restoration it just doesn't make any sense to do this while for leveling being feral or balanced and just throwing on as much intellect and Spirit Gear as possible will be fine as long as your tank isn't trying to do some crazy polls there is even a feral spec involving hearts of the wild towards the bottom of that tree that players used back in classic to successfully be able to tank eel or DPS depending on their gear setup but that's very much a very late game thing due to how many talents need to be invested also due to Druids being able to fill multiple roles if you do want to be flexible you kinda need to be maintained attaining multiple gear sets wagon Bank space allowing of course that's wise we're playing hardcore so take stamina of course but aside from that healers will want intellect and spirit balance will want intellect spirit and any of Arcane wrath gear that you can find Barrel DPS agility and strength and feral tank armor agility and strength so survivability can the Druid get out of a sticky situation this depends quite heavily on one question are you outside if yes they're good if no they're pretty average though classic is a game with lots of random RPG flavor you can't even talk to NPCs in form for example another one of these flavor moments is the very nature aligned Druids being at full power outdoors and missing some key parts of their toolkit indoors travel form entangling roots and the talents Nature's grasp and Feline swiftness all need you to be outdoors to get the full benefit and actual really work and these make up a decent bit of the druid's ability to just outrun everything also the barrier between indoors and Outdoors can be very arbitrary and sometimes unclearing classic too so don't always rely on what you can see aside from that for survivability as great as you'll heal over time effects are they're really Mana expensive and whether you're feral or balanced you're going to be going through your Mana bar fast trying to heal and fight at the same time your other escape tools include Dash in cat form and Bash as well as frenzied regeneration in Bear form over these are quite good but leave you slowly running away in birth form which you should be doing if indoors as the extra armor will reduce the damage you're taking by a pretty significant amount droids also have a few other tricks up their sleeve that can help too bark skin is in classic even though it's kinda scuffed you can't cast it in shape-shift forms it makes non-instant spells take one second longer to cast and it slows your melee attack speed by 25 percent or all of that but you do take twenty percent less physical damage for its duration droids can remove curses and poisons which make up quite a substantial amount of the debuffs you receive drawing and leveling at level 40 you passively get feline Grace this reduces fall damage in cat form and you can reduce the attack range of beasts with soothe animal I'm sure someone at some point has actually used this ability I mean it could be useful if you're running out of a cave with loads of beasts in such as the gorilla cave in ongaro for example finally hibernate putting a beast or dragonkin to sleep for a long time this is one of the few long duration CCS that work versus dragonkin and is really easily forgotten hibernate can also allow you to reset a fight halfway through and heal up or to just get away definitely don't sleep on this ability next up leveling speed is the Droid faster level well in brief if you are feral yes it's pretty good the mix of low down time thanks to heels and good single Target damage meaning you can keep going and going on the other hand balance won't be so fast but the reasons for that we should get onto now in the talent section because if there's one time to actually live the moon kin dream and see how it plays out why not do it during leveling this is part of the game where there's no demand for Min maxing or meta gaming or anything like that I mean balance still isn't going to be great to be honest but if you wanted to find out firsthand why well let's see how that might work out I think similar to other Druid specs you start going in to improve wrath in a specialization somewhat like this but later when you get access to Starfire and improves Starfire you consider swapping over to using that spell as it's a lot more manner efficient I'm thinking with this spec maybe improved Thorns over Roots but with no Shields and no spell knockback protection on the balance Druid I can see rank one Roots into kiting being something which you get very familiar with doing maybe you take improved wrath as well because Five Points into Nature's grasp but does feel like a lot for what it's giving you back then again if if you do find any of our cane wrath items they're wasted on your nature damage in the Resto tree this is as far as I would go in classic droids damage over time effects just aren't good they can't quit and they just cost so much Mana for the amount of damage they do oh and insect swarm is in the restoration tree which means it's a restoration spell which means you can't cast it in mooncan form welcome to Classic overall it's definitely a harder and considerably longer waiter level than feral but if you wanted to give it a go those are just a few thoughts from me on how I'd go about it but for most people they will be going feral for the hardcore challenge again there's definitely going to be a time when you respect during your leveling I mean you don't even start off with bear or cat form at level 1 and spending one gold to Respec at some point is better than leveling with sub-optimal talents for a long time from Level 1 to 20 I would do something along the line of this and of course when you have talents you're level 10 you already have bear form but being more of a spellcaster during the early levels still works quite well this gives you points for improved wrath Nature's grass natural weapons and Omen of clarity the alternative if you just went and put points into feral by this level would be five less rage on Maul and 10 percent more Rama maybe one's better than the other maybe it's not typical with the Druid but there's options here at level 20 you get cat form and really start to come online if you respect here there's also a number of choices to consider I actually quite like getting the utility stuff first and then going into feral quite a bit later you're for me and the Resto tree is such a huge quality of life boost the Thai borderline want it right away it allows you to bash instantly the moment you shift into perform and to deal damage faster after you go back into cats after that going back into balance and down to Omen of clarity will pick up a lot of great supportive talents just remember Omen of clarity is an active ability which lasts 10 minutes in classic not a passive really annoying I know but make a week or or something to remind you to keep it active after that it's pretty standard fare down the feral tree most the talents are pretty good and you want to pick them up notably brutal impact and feral charge for those little extra bits of survivability so what abilities are we going to be spending our gold on and what should we be avoiding wouldn't you know it kinda depends on what you're playing so here I've tried to color code as usual green is stuff I'll level up whenever possible whatever spec I'm playing yellow is optional or don't level up fully and red is a void orange or abilities your level when focusing on feral and blue is for balance the abilities are put in green here are really your core Druid tools whatever spec you're playing Buffs such as Thorns or Mark of the wild utility and Bash frenzied Rejuvenation your heel over time is Dash all that kind of stuff the yellow abilities come in but just not so often such as fairy fire entangling Roots hibernate all those type of spells power hurricane rebirth and train quality don't quite seem worth it to me possible exception if you're going for a lot of group content then maybe level up Hurricane even though Max rank it costs an early 1500 Mana I don't even know why they put a one minute cooldown on it you'll be out of manner after a few casts anyway but hey that's classic for you isn't it aside from that it's just leveling up the abilities that make the most sense of the specialization that you are playing they're all good damage increases just try and stick to one spec all things start getting super expensive by the time you're hitting level 40 or so let's finish up with some macros and add-ons macros first this one will remove a curse from yourself or from an ally if you Mouse over them it's a handy macro so you don't have to go changing targets to do this and can be applied to any of The Druids targeted utility spells as well such as abolish poison innovate and so on this next macro will use aquatic or travel form depending on whether or not you are in water just saves a space on your bar by combining the buttons and this macro will activate Dash with a single button instead of having to go into cat form and then pressing Dash again just saves some time there are only a few add-ons specific to the Droid which I would want and in all cases there are many add-ons which achieve these kind of goals so I'm just going to give some recommendations here first up is something to track Mana whilst you're in shape shift form as the basic UI does not do this an add-on like Droid bar classic simple Druid Mana these kind of add-ons seem to do what I'd be after here second is something to track your energy ticks in cat form and to make your combo points stand out a bit more but these no combo bar and nog energy would do what you need and that for me is the Droid in hardcore classic if there has ever been a time for the person who actually wants to experience any of the Druid specs in classic to their fullest this might just be it whilst I do think there are some pretty clear options which are going to be faster leveling in classic isn't not exactly a race in the first place whether it's balance feral or something in between the Druid should be a flexible pick with tons of options the Rogue is a class known for their versatility in World of Warcraft whether it's consistent damage and clevedon game or burst and CC and PVP the rogue's extensive toolkits of Tricks lend itself well to many areas of content and when it comes to leveling this class also does fairly well albeit they are a bit of a slow starter during those early and most dangerous levels either way today we delve into the depths of this class and check out how the Rogue fares in hardcore wow so if you're starting up on Hardcore or thinking what class should I try is the road going to be a good pick there I think it's somewhere in the middle of the pack there are harder challenges and most definitely easier too we'll get more into this point later but when you look at the rogue's toolkits of gouge cheap shot kidney sharp blind evasion Sprint vanish you think to yourself how does anyone ever even die on this class and the answer is it's the early game most people die around level 12 to 14 and hardcore wow by that level you have gouge evasion and Sprint which are good but it's just surprising how fast things can go south when you're playing a class with no built-in self-healing I think if you've been a long-term Rogue player you'll have gotten used to the fact that you need to take things a bit slower during the start of the game whereas later on you can be a little more free to use your cooldowns and keep moving forwards also a quick mention here for some of the class quests I don't want to totally spoil them if you're going in blind or haven't played a rogue in a while but let me just say the Rogue is a class known for not playing fair and your quests will pull that trick back on you quite a few times over if you fail to follow directions properly also the poison quest which you can do as early as level 20 wait till 22 when you have vanish believe me either way I'd say the Rogue is relatively new player friendly but definitely not the easiest 60 to ding in the game so how does the Rogue perform solo when it comes to leveling and Elites I reckon again quite well though it is somewhat dependent on what talent setup you've decided to go down Rogues are one of the two classes in the game to possess stealth and the only class who can enter stealth during combat through vanish there are plenty of quests with items at the back of a cave or where you've cleared to the back of a cave and need to bring back to the entrance again in fact this one entrance one exit makes caves high risk for the majority of classes in the game Rogues kind of don't have to worry about this as much and as long as you're careful with your pathing and stealth you can skip past what other classes can't or just straight up Sprint and get away against Elites Rogues can be a little bit variable generally they can absolutely demolish casters and treat their cast times like free damage before landing a cc effect but struggle more versus pure melee attackers particularly those with two-handed weapons in case you didn't know in classic there's this thing called Parry haste when any unit yourself or an enemy parries a Target the next swing timer is reduced by 50 percent this means when you're chopping away with your dual wheeled versus some ogre with a big two-hander you're giving them a lot of chances to Parry therefore speeding up their attacks it can really catch you off guard so watch out for that though Rogues despite not having any built-in healing have perhaps some of the most CC in the game to lock down individual mobs and you can definitely use that CC effectively to either bandage or wait for energy ticks to re-engage another strong tactic versus Elites as to how crippling poison running and to open combat with a garage into a five combo Point rupture and then count away as they gradually take damage from the darts what about being part of a group then well if there's a Premier Choice of melee DPS for dungeons for me that's got to be the Rogue this class is really valuable in group based content have you ever wondered how hardcore groups get past the gate in BlackRock depths that needs the shadow Forge key a key which you quite literally need to have died in order to accept the quest to get it the answer is a lock picking I mean you can get through with engineering safarium charges or blacksmithing skeleton keys too but Rogues can do it for free you can get through the first door in Diamond North as well and if somebody gets a lock box hey you can open that right up for them if you want to use CC Rogues have sap big warning for classic sap though it will drop you out of stealth when you use it so do be aware of that Rogues can easily lock a dangerous mob out of combat for 10 seconds with a simple cheap shot into kidney shot that's long enough for your group to get through almost any health bar in a dungeon they have no down time as they're using energy this is great if things go wrong or a pull goes on longer than you expect it to and they're a great source of damage pretty much whatever they spec into on their talent tree and if things start to go very wrong well you can type f in chat press vanish and live to see another day that is the rogue way to do things right if you're running as a Duo a trio or whatever type of other group aside from doing dungeons Rogues are also an excellent melee when their health bar can be propped up via healing and they can get the most out of their slice and dice this class can really start to tear through multiple enemies and no problem in group content a rogue fills everything you want from a melee class and is pretty much always a good pickup which brings us to survivability so there's quite a bit to say here and some of it isn't totally obvious but we'll go over the basics first the Rogue is an archetype across so many games that is literally known for their ability to weasel themselves out of bad situations through some kind of deception or trickery so you already know they're not going to disappoint when it comes to survivability you unlock early ranks of gouge and evasion and Sprint before level 10 poisons as early as level 20 vanish at 22 cheap shot at 26 kidney shot at 30 and blind at 34. these abilities are the things that will keep you alive when things go wrong they all have varying cooldowns and costs are differently according to your talents play around them pulling two mobs with evasion is very low risk pulling two mobs without well that could go poorly if you get unlucky during the fight also kind of like a hunter remember to stock up on your items when you're in town you have to create your own poisons via a class the unique profession lock picking is also treated as a profession with there being several hubs across the world to level it out banish needs Vanishing powder you can just go buy that off NPCs and blind needs blinding powder this can usually be crafted from one fader Leaf which need 160 herbalism together and I usually don't cover professions in these videos simply because it feels as though I would be saying just Do engineering mining or Alchemy Herb in every single video maybe I should do a separate video for profession so let me know if you want to see that but for Rogues in particular herbalism is very good but who knows maybe we can trade pretty freely on official servers and this isn't really something you need to think about on the subject of herbalism there's another reason you should pick it up thistle tea this is a reward from one of your class quests instantly restoring 100 energy on a five minute cooldown this is an incredible item to overcome some of the more challenging quests in the game the problem is you need a swift thistle to make it which I found when Gathering Mage Royal at 50 herbalism or bryethawn 70. so whenever you're taking on a solo challenge or just want to ensure you always have the items with you the herb elk combo is very good on the Rogue now on to the kind of less obvious stuff so distract is usable out of stealth and you should 100 have it keybinded you've had that moment where you're fighting something there's a Patrol coming which you can see and you can't run away because there's other mobs behind you but you could have distracted the patrol so you have enough time to finish the fight you're doing and then stealth safely away you can also distract out a single mob that are part of a larger Patrol such as on lieutenant fangor and red Ridge Mountains on the alliance or run Anna think they're cruel in STV for The Horde distract is a very useful survivability spell keep it in mind next we have to talk stealth it is rogue's core ability and the first rank you get of it absolutely sucks mobs will see you well before engaging them especially if approaching from the front and that's due to how stealth level Works each stealth level which funnily enough is a hidden stat will improve how hard you are to attacked five stealth levels are equal to one combat level if your stealth level is well below enemies you're attempting to engage they're probably going to see you before you can get the jump on them unless you're approaching from behind for example here's stealth rank one you can see in the spell details the stealth value mod is five this means it will be effective against enemies who are Level 1 or 2. you get the next rank of Stealth at level 20 which as you can see here improves your stealth level by 100 meaning it's now effective versus level 20 enemies the later ranks come at 1460 and also make stealth effective against those level of enemies so essentially don't rely totally on Stealth at early levels or Midway having through learned a newer rank oh and don't forget safe all is a passive is something you learn at level 40 not straight away so don't go throwing yourself off cliffs thinking you'll be fine next is vanish so if you play classic in 2019 you may remember sometimes you vanish and mobs just keep hitting you when you get knocked out of stealth instantly again it appears at the time it was down to the 400 Ms batching thing blizzard had going on back then but it can still happen even on classic error right now if a mobs melee swing happens exactly at the right time as you press vanish they can still cancel the ability you always as much as you possibly can want to create some distance between yourself and the target when Vanishing to mitigate this or press the ability just after an attacker's landed and if you can't do either of those press the button and hope for the best finally some enemies have true sight so this means they ignore stealth now in later versions of wow there's some kind of blue eye icon that hovers over the head to tell you that they have this ability I feel like in classic sometimes I have seen this on mobs when they have true sight and other times I have not maybe I'm just mixing up between seeing it on different versions of the game maybe it's been implemented in an inconsistent manner either way there is one type of enemy which very consistently does have true sight and that is the tracking dog or hyena model they're found all over the place but most notably pets for the Scarlet Crusade Centaur of the Barons and desolace and the ogres of diamond in Fairless though even if you can't see the blue icon over their head if it's a tracking dog or hyena just assume they have true sight and don't risk going anywhere near them also speaking of true sight I wouldn't be surprised if mobs with Sentry or luck out in their name have some kind of hidden stealth detection modifier or perhaps even true sight themselves that's exactly the kind of thing blizzard would have put on mobs back in vanilla so moving on how fast is this class to level I think Rogue depends quite a bit on experience with the class and you can definitely say that for every class can't you but there have been speed leveling challenges completed on classic with the Rogue where it's among one of the fastest but it's often quite a high risk play style that gets those results a hardcore it's more of a marathon than a Sprint and spending that extra time eating to full health is better than a visit back to your starter Zone based on that I'd say rogue's average speed for the leveling portion of the game which brings us on to town balance scenario that I think is very interesting for the Rogue were two rather distinct paths are available the most common that you will see will be combat and it's really hard to argue with the effectiveness of this spec this spec picks up amazing talents such as ripost which has a low energy cost a great damage modifier and it disarms the target for six seconds combat gets improved gouge allowing more time to run if you need to or to wait for energy takes both endurance and improved Sprints give you that extra bit of survivability and some counter play versus Roots whilst in combat later in the tree the combination of Blade flurry and Adrenaline Rush allow you to easily cleave down several mobs at once many classes don't even get an offensive cooldown at all so Rose getting 2 is huge weapon specialization wise honestly it depends whether we can trade in the game if we can't or it's limited chances are you may not have a main and an offhand weapon that really justifies specking into something ideally you would want sword for the extra swing chance but we can talk more about weapons soon in fact it does open up the ability to go more into defensive talents as well so maybe it's just a play for hardcore either way but there is another leveling spec you can go down and something along this line was what I used when leveling my rogue during vanilla the reason being is as effective as combat can be for me it has two problems one it just doesn't really rely on stealth all that much and I kind of like stealth and like upgrading it and two combat generates combo points very slowly and then spends them mostly on slice and dice which doesn't see full uptime due to running between mobs so the alternative is leveling as subtlety and it is not half bad you know the whole idea behind this spec is you open with an almost guaranteed crit from Ambush with a dagger swapped to a higher damage main handed weapon ghostly strike spam hemo and then use combo points on whatever fits between eviscerates lice and dice or rupture improved Ambush and remorseless attack so what are going to give you that opening crit initiative and setup for extra combo Point generation and and Hemorrhage will be your alternative to Sinister strike which also costs less energy you get preparation 2 in this tree to reset all of your cooldowns I mean your survivability goes up dramatically in this spec and premeditation is at the bottom of the tree it has a two minute cooldown for reasons in classic either way it's an instant five combo points alongside an ambush with an initiative prop over in the assassination tree there's just some generally good DPS improving talents which add extra combo points and improve the effectiveness of your crits what I will say for this spec is you want both a slow dagger and a main hand weapon to swap to in order to do good damage also it kinda just sucks until Level 20. I mean you don't get ambushed to level 18 and stealth Rank 2 is 20 and you do need both of these things for it to work well before that you're just going to be playing scuffed combat worth a go though if you get a good dagger against casters you can remove about 40 of their health in the opening Ambush which I think is a really fun alternative to combat ability wise you really want to be picking up the majority of the things that Rogues have to to offer as per usual here green means I'll level whenever I get the chance yellow optional or don't level fully and red is avoid Sinister strike backstab and Ambush are spec dependent of course it can gouge deal very minor damage from being leveled up and gold wise aren't the best investment Banks can be useful in group content but doesn't feel super mandatory to level avoidability wise I don't know when you get used out of expose armor over pretty much any other finishing move in the game also I'd skip some poisons the rule of thumb in classic is poisons are great utility not very great damage for me instant plus crippling or mind-numbing or just both for the utility poisons would be the way to go on to weapon progression as a rogue we of course care about having good weapons the biggest concern for whatever you're playing is a slow main handed weapon low is valuable as many of your attacks instantly deal damage as Library percentage of your weapons damage such as on ambush or a flat extra amount such as on Sinister strike your rfand is generally a faster weapon used applying poisons but can also gain more value when your combats are due to dual wield specialization and any weapon spec you've opted into starting off as a general point for Rogues don't underestimate just buying common quality weapons from vendors the raw stat increase of a higher level weapon will eventually beat out an uncommon weapon and rare weapons in time too there are also a ton of one-handed weapons on offer from various Quest rewards more than I could possibly cover here but I'll go over a few good examples of Swords early game for Alliance Daryl's short sword from a hunter's challenge is a good main hander which can later move over to offhand as you upgrade and for horde the elegant short sword from Serena bloodfeather in the Barons is a good starter there are tons of options in the mid game so I want to focus on the ones which are going to be the biggest upgrade for both factions and both factions need to do dungeon quests here there's kind of not really options that can match up to how good this weapon combo is for Alliance these order Serenity from in the name of the light will last you for a very long time this Quest chain starts in Stormwind with brother Anton and mainly takes place in desolace alongside this you want to take the quest to bring the light which will award the vanquish's sword this is just from defeating the last boss of Razor Fen Downs on horde there's a similar quest to doing razor Fenn Downs for the vanquish's sword this time it's called bring the end and it starts in the under City horde also has a quest for a full run of the Scarlet dungeons called into the Scarlet Monastery which will award the sword of omen the next upgrade is from Corruption of Earth and Seed which involves defeating princess theradras in maradon this will get your thrash blade which will lash you to level cap your daggers however are a bit harder to come by for Alliance early game a fairly easy quest to get done is red silk bandanas in Westfall this Awards the scrimshank dagger behold the quest chain starting with resting in pieces ending with one to Bethel Awards a decent dagger it is in Silver Pine though and there aren't too many Alternatives you can also get a dagger from the Serena bloodthyr Quest 2 though mid-game Alliance have these ceremonial Elven blade from the quest line in Fairless starting with psychometric reading and horde have the final part of the Call to Arms questline in a wrathy from hammerful this is an elite Quest but it gives you a dagger that will last for some time it should be doable if played carefully late game the big pickup from questing is from the remains of Trey lightforge which starts from escorting an NPC out of Shadow holding felwood the only problem from this Quest is there is also a sword which is very good if you haven't been able to find anything in that category let's finish up with a few macros and add-ons then something unique to the Rogue is pickpocketing and you can macro it into your opener from stealth to get that little extra bit of gold as you level keep in mind you do have dilute mobs twice in order to get the pickpocketed gold but playing Sub in particular I found that macaron my dagger into stealth made things a lot easier and you always want to start a tank macro regardless of what spec you're playing it doesn't need the weapon equipped if you're playing combat also you'd want to swap himo for sinister strike add-on wise there is isn't a ton I would really specifically need on the Rogue as always I'm a fan of using some kind of Swing timer for judging incoming damage and Rogues of course have tons of CC and ways to interrupt so using modern Target frame and Omni CC will allow you to see the duration of ccfx on targets as well as the length of time they are interrupted for and that I think is just about the Rogue this class is a little more tricky than it appears to get to 60 at the first glance with the early levels being deceptively dangerous once you start to learn your core abilities though the Rope really turns into a Powerhouse class in both solo and group content overall if you're looking for a pure melee class in classic hardcore Rogue is a good mix of accessibility while still offering some level of challenge thank you thank you the priest is a class that channels the light to heal allies and Shadow to harm enemies though in classic priests were often seen as primarily healers during the end game the much more leveling focused hardcore allows you to flex into the DPS role as Shadow priests also have a number of unique class mechanics to them through race specific spells A system that was eventually done away with by wrath with tons to cover let's check out the priest in hardcore wow though this may come somewhat as a surprise but I think priest is genuinely one of if not the most new player friendly class in the game when it comes to approaching the hardcore Challenge and seeing how they wear cloth and have limited Mobility that doesn't really make sense but I'm gonna back it up with some numbers so there's an add-on for classic error Called Death log which Aggregates deaths in hardcore to put out numbers such as heat maps for difficult Terriers most dangerous mobs and to compare average chance of success between different classes this is a snapshot I took on June 1st comparing some 78 000 results you can see priest is very low on the percentage of total deaths only being beaten out by a faction-specific class in Shaman in fact a disregarding faction-specific classes which by the nature will always have less players pre-star the most consistent class in the game at level 20 and Beyond and by a pretty huge margin whereas warlock for example which you would expect to be one of the best classes in the game struggle a ton more than priest players a priest is an early seven times more likely to hit Level 50 than a warlock which is just kind of crazy to me and say what you want about how classes should play and what should be the easiest but the numbers don't lie the priest is for sure an absolute Beast of a class for the hardcore challenge we will get more into why priests have a much better chance of getting further during talking about their survivability but suffice to say if you're starting off the hardcore challenge raced I think is a pretty good pick when it comes to playing solo the priest is probably one of the most efficient classes in the game that has a Mana bar when I leveled my priest originally on classic I probably only used a couple of stacks of food and water between levels 1 and 60 because simply perhaps you just rarely need to stop and drink if you aren't over polling and you're making good use of your wand speaking of Wands I hope you like wondering because you're going to be spending a whole lot of time gradually wearing down enemies with your dots and wand in fact priest in hardcore is kind of like a wand that was given a few extra abilities only joking I think at least getting hold of a good one and trying to keep it upgraded is essential on the priest more so than on any other class by an absolute Mile and we'll definitely be talking weapon progression later the Reliance on your wand however is what makes priests so efficient your average combat is gonna go power word Shield mind blast Shadow word pain wand repeat and that time wanding is enough time to regenerate pretty much all the Mana you've just spent on on that particular combat passively if played slow and steady priests do literally not have down time and you only ever need to drink after taking on several mobs at once or after something goes wrong against Elite mobs priests are also highly capable which again doesn't make a ton of sense for a cloth wearer with limited CC that's face tanking damage but it just works the combo of consistent outgoing damage self-heels Shields and psychic scream when needed make for a class which is surprisingly efficient at taking on Elite enemies and of course once you get Shadow form priest ability to solo things absolutely shoots through the roof if anything priests do have two notable weaknesses in Solo content they have no ability to break physical routes such as Nets and enemies that possess mortal strike effects make yourself healing way less effective all the same I definitely rate priests very highly in Solo content I also want to quickly cover the racial spells as a priest as they can certainly influence which race you decide to roll on The Horde troll has hex of weakness which reduces an enemy's damage by a small amount as well as healing received they also get Shadow guard this is kind of like a lightning Shield type effect which deals damage when you're attacked importantly this can proc your talent blackout making it a very effective solo play Tool Undead get touch of weakness which reduces an enemy's damage after they attack you by a small amount and devouring plague this dot would eventually become standard to all priests but in classic it's a long cooldown ability that deals heavy damage and heals the priests for the same amount over on the alliance Knight elves have a loon's Grace which is a bit of a strange ability reducing range damage taken and increasing Dodge Chance by 10 for 15 seconds they also get star shards this channeled ability can be used in place of wanding unfortunately Mana regeneration does not kick in whilst channeling so it has a direct effect on priest's renowned efficiency humans get desperate prayer a 10 minute cooldown instant Caster zero Mana big heel this ability is so good for getting you out of a bad spot and the early ranks of it might as well be a lie on hands they also get feedback which is uh difficult to use I think when hit by a spell it burns some of the enemy's mana and does damage per Mana burned it also costs a lot of Mana to cast for what it does it's only viable versus casters and you tend really not to care about NPC's Mana bar all that much so it's not the most useful I think finally dwarves they also get desperate prayer which is amazing of course and they also get fear Ward this spell is very overpowered in classic it's a 30 second cooldown 10 minute duration making the target immune to the next fear effector they receive to put in perspective how good this spell is in classic when blizzard gave this ability to all priests in TBC they had to put it up to a three minute cooldown and a three minute duration overall on The Horde there's an argument for either race there I'd probably lean towards Undead due to their other ratios and devouring plague making priests even better at soloing stuff than they already are on Alliance dwarf kind of op you even get stone formed to immune blades and poisons which you can't deal with usually as a priest but those are options you pick what fits you best moving on though to group content when Parting Up the priest gets arguably even better than they are Solo bringing a powerful toolkit whether they're healing or dpsing what's really good about grouping up with a priest is everyone gets power word fortitude of course every buff adds up in a group but on Hardcore the one that gives you a lot of extra Health it's really nice to have and though priests are often seen as a Healer class Shadow feels a lot better in smaller scale content than it does in raids it doesn't run into issues anymore with having to worry about debuff caps on enemies or being considered not viable due to their damage output in fact a shadow priest in the dungeon will do just fine the main issue is still regarding their Mana when they aren't consistently able to land killing blows to park Spirit tap so you will still be dotting and wanding a lot in dungeons too the other side of the priest and the one I think you may see a little more often will be the healer group content and whilst you may not have a full-on Healer Talent setup if you've been buying ranks of spells and have some practice using them priests can still make for a very capable addition to a group I even remember doing all demand during Classic on my priest where on most bosses I would power would Shield the tank before they went in and then our DPS in Shadow form with vampiric Embrace active if they needed healing beyond that I'd drop out of Shadow form and actually heal them directly perhaps it's a bit more risky doing that when you're playing a hardcore but hey if your tank over levels the content and they're well geared it should work just fine also the other good thing about healing group content is in classic spell damage and healing are split into two different stats though if a healing item drops you never have any competition from someone else in the group on it right then on to survivability why are priest players making it so much further than the average class in the hardcore challenge I reckon it comes down to a mix of a lot of different factors working together first of all Buffs I've already mentioned it but Power word for attitude is a nice extra chunk of stamina that will have saved you before if you're playing a priest and you won't even have noticed it inner fire also gives you a lot of extra armor to ensure that you're somewhat protected against physical attackers speaking of physical attacks unlike any other Caster in general you're actually trading hits on a priest on a regular basis this means your defense skill is being actively trained as you level up which means you aren't going to be consistently weak to crushing blows as certain other classes such as the hunter or Mage who aren't taking direct hits a lot will be next is the fact that Priests get their whole leveling rotation given to them pretty early game if I'm honest now you might take some time to get a wand from a quest but once you do the good old trusty pre-shield mind blast Dot and one rotation will take you from your starter Zone pretty much to level cap it's simple and it's really effective there's no Reliance on a pet to do work for you or potential danger if one of your major spells such as Frost and over gets resisted you just face tank stuff often gradually wear them down power word Shield is also kind of overpowered being a disciplined spell it can be cast in Shadow form and absorbs a large amount of damage it also places a debuff on the player for 15 seconds meaning they can't benefit from a power wedge Shield again this 15 second downtime is kind of the window where your character is Mortal Albert Shield does two very more important things too first of all while it holds you suffer zero spell knockback meaning you can heal or DPS as needed secondly with a shield on you cannot be dazed enemies have to deal damage to you in order to Daze you though whilst other classes have to do all this strafe jumping when running away to ensure no dazes if you have a shield up you just press the button and then do a 180 and run away I mean you still do want to practice strafe jumping for what it's worth but if you don't bother then power word Shield will probably carry you anyways there is utility in the priest kit too psychic scream is unpredictable but can send several mobs running away from you giving you time to recover mindsu reduces enemy's aggro radius by a large amount which is far more useful than people give it credit for especially in dungeons Jackal and Dad should also not be forgotten about it's a good single Target CC against Undead and there's plenty of Undead in classic there's mind control too so if you're having difficulty on a tough Elite Quest just mind control one of them and have them fight it out it works really well grease also have a ton of self heals as well very efficient ones too such as renewal downranking heel once you get vampiric Embrace in the shadow tree it gives really powerful self-healing when you do damage and eventually you'll get Shadow form as both another offensive and defensive tool race may not look it but they really are up there with some of the most durable and safe classes in the game so is the priests faster level I think the best way I can put this is that they are faster than they feel and that's purely down to the standard rotation against each marble being more or less the same every time even versus casters you kind of still just Shield Dot and wand I mean it works well but that's how it is the big thing in terms of speed that priests are going for them is very low down time if played slow and steady between each pull for me speed wise priests are a middle upper middle of the pack kind of class certainly good but there's faster right then on to talents where are we going to be investing in our points the first thing I want to bring up is a possibility of not leveling as Shadow now to be honest I'm not sure I'm entirely sold on it I know for a fact that shadow can hear leveling dungeons just fine and when you're not in a dungeon you are way more effective when fully specked into Shadow either way you might want to try something different such as smiting instead it is a lot less manner efficient but I reckon something along this line might work out the idea here would be to go into wanting early and then go straight into Shadow for Spirit tap spell hit and increase duration on Shadow wear pain after that we go back into holy to improve your heels and offensive capability with holy spells then we go into discipline and get some important talents to age or Buffs and heels all the way down to Divine Spirit finally finishing out with more talents in the Holy tree to improve the capability of your heels and holy spells a little bit more this build is definitely a bit more out there but Priestess are very flexible when it comes to talents and at the end of the day hardcore is a leveling challenge so see what works for you and whether you can find something unique but for most people they will be specking into Shadow this is one of those specializations where you'll be doing a respect at some point in time but starting off and up to level 40 it's going to look something like this the important part here is to go straight into one specialization even if you don't have a wand yet for real wondering is going to be a lot of your damage and this Talent is just too good to miss out on from then on it's into the shadow tree and it's pretty standard stuff Spirit tap into improve Shadow wear pain and three points in the spell hit chance Talent then we get mind play bonus spell range and Shadow weaving in Classic Shadow weaving is a debuff on enemies is not a buff on you so even though you won't have it stacked most of the time it can add up to 15 more damage total which is just too much to pass up on even if it only gets to three out of five stacks on average I've missed off a few talents here and I'll explain why improve my unblast's five Talent points for not that big of an effect the big benefit of specking into this is when you can mind play twice back to back into a mind blast on cooldown this does great damage but it's terrible for your Mana bar and your Mana bar is kind of more important when you're questing I've also gone Five Points into blackout instead of improved psychic scream and silence ten percent chance to stun for three seconds which can proc off of every ticker Shadow or pain or mind play that sounds pretty good to me and in case you're wondering yes this stun does have a diminishing return with itself silence whilst useful feels like more of a PVP Talent pastors when you're leveling just aren't as threatening as melee the vast majority of the time the fact that they can't quit or crush with spells and you can easily lie cite them means that a lot of counter players already available at level 40 it is Respec time why Shadow form of course now some people may argue you want to stay with this one spec until Level 42 or something but I say shadow form as soon as possible because Shadow form looks cool this back in of itself is pretty similar to the other one however with more Talent points to spend you can pick up the remainder of the CC related effects in the shadow tree and then go into discipline to improve your Buffs and Mana efficiency of course whatever you're doing at 60 be it heal or DPS you should expect your talent points to change around once again but for the leveling portion of the game this should work just fine ability wise pretty much everything you can get is useful at something though it will depend on your play style and to what extent you want to group and flex between DPS or healing as per usual greener's upgrade where possible yellow optional or I wouldn't Max it immediately and red is a void this list shows all the racial abilities too which you should level where possible might and holy fire will be picked up early game naturally but unless you're going full on Smite mode you wouldn't continue ranking them up mind Vision soothe and fade are all in the utility category good to have points in but you may not need the maxed out similar scenario for some of your healing abilities you just might not need to prioritize maxing them out right away the only spell to avoid is of course resurrect doesn't tend to be too useful when playing hardcore that though you can res hunter pets if that was ever somehow useful to you so maybe you get rank 1. onto weapon progression then priest is the Caster where having a good weapon is the most important and you're certainly going to be getting a ton of use out of your wand first up don't forget to check up on wand vendors for common quality items at some point they will start to outperform Quest rewards that you're able to find or if you just didn't do the quest that award ones you can always get one from a vendor secondly as Shadow Ones Will scale with Shadow vulnerability and Shadow form as they are a source of Shadow damage however they will not prop blackouts as your wand is is not considered a shadow spell itself so Shadow ones are nice but not always a realistic choice so early game for Alliance there's two main choices both are at the end of quest chains depending on which zone you picked over in dark Shore the final part of the quest chained bashalaran will award the Elven wand or alternatively in Westfall the spark of the people's militia from the eponymous questline or would have a few options too one of them is here from the Escape rewarding the flowering baton but also have a huge quest line in the Barons beginning with serga darkthorne and ending in Isha a whack it's the series of quests where you have to collect zebra who's that one everyone's done at least part of it it ends up rewarding The Branding Rod which is a level 27 wand which will last you for a very long time the big mid game one to go after is a dungeon quest in black fathom's deep starting from the quest black travel and villainy either in darnassus or thunderbluff it has you venture forth into the dungeon to slay one of the bosses and the reward is the gravestone scepter a good upgrade beyond that is again available to both factions in booty Bay from the second part in the quest line starting with singing Blue shards named Venture company mining this will give you the goblin igniter later on in the game there's also a few good options but they split into faction specific again Alliance have the latter part of the quest chain in Northern pharaohless which ends in the quest the morrow stone for the kernstone silver or have a more dangerous Quest a dark vessels from the elite subzone in the Hinterlands ginthara law it is a collect Quest though so shouldn't be too risky and this will give Nature's breath let's finish up on a few macros and add-ons priest is a class that wons a lot so you already know I'm going to be saying cast shoot here this makes it so you can't toggle wand on or off via double clicking it's a preference thing for me really but I find it super useful priest has a ton of spells that can be used on allies this can act as a self-cast or if you Mouse over will cast on an ally replace with as many abilities as you need such as dispel magic your disease and so on you can also put your Buffs into a single macro which will reset if you wait a few seconds it just saves a bit of bar space and makes it so they're all in one place and you're going to be pressing in a fire a decent amount anyways add-on wise for a priest there's just really two weak auras that I'd use the first one is to show debuff timers on name plates you want to track your dot durations there's many ways to do this this is just how I do it also Nan Shield to track how much power word Shield you have left incredibly useful this one I definitely recommend and for me that is the priest in classic hardcore a class with a lot of flavor having race specific spells and statistically a class which I think will outperform most people's expectations during the end game priest is always a very sought after class of course though definitely leaning towards more of a Healer play style than Shadow but for the leveling portion of the game priests are both a highly efficient and flexible class priest may not be the most obvious first choice but I think they are quite a good starting point for the hardcore challenge kind of depending on how much you like wanding as you better like wanding a lot laughs thank you the Warlock was my pick for Classics release back in 2019 and overall the class I put the most time into I even ended up leveling a second one to see what questing was like on The Horde and I don't regret it one bit with a mix of unique utility damage over time spells and a demon to help leveling the Warlock is a class that offers a surprising amount of supportive tools given their reputation of mainly being a damage dealer as always there's going to be plenty to cover here so let's make a start on the Warlock in hardcore classic wow now you would expect a warlock being a pet class to be quite new player friendly however somewhat counter-intuitively I think they are not as safe as people make them out to be one of the largest reasons for that is how you deal damage and how your demon generates the rat see when you're on a hunter just as a comparison if you over aggro your pets and you instantly stop attacking apart from your damage take from serpent sting your damage output goes to zero your pair twos as Focus will then nearly always get aggro back with their next cast of growl and then eventually on the hunter you also get feigned death to make resetting easy mode on a warlock you know what you have running on a mob if you're fighting it damage over time effects if you over aggro your pet is probably not going to be able to catch up because you're still doing a whole bunch of damage without actively having to attack your target curse of Agony even ramps up in damage over its duration your voidwalker assuming that's what's tanking will also use mana and eventually they will run out of Mana or their spell-based taunt gets resisted which thing is torment is a shadow spell and some mobs have high Shadow resistance it will feel as though it's getting resisted a lot more than a hunter's pet growl would also torment Baseline is straight up worse than growl it just generates a less threat and you have to spec into improved void Walker to make it better also hunter pets is a tank do way more damage have better resistances attack faster move faster and yeah so on and so forth but then again you don't have to just use the void Walker part of the Warlock experience is using the correct demon for the job and we'll be talking more about that during talents later warlocks also have the class fantasy of trading something for power one of the ways you can overdo this for sure is via life tap and since warlock spells are quite costly you're going to be using this ability a lot sometimes too often in the face of danger when instead you should be wanding and preserving your health a little more we'll be taking a look at some of the stats for the success rates of warlocks in the hardcore challenge later but as a newer player this class is trickier than you would expect it to be so how does the Warlock perform when questing solo well the Warlock motto is if you can fear it you can kill it and there are no exceptions this class makes taking on High level mobs or Elites just to look plain unfair and it's all thanks to warlock's most iconic ability and CC fear a one and a half second cast spell that will send an enemy running in a random Direction Orwell who really knows how long beer can last for one second or it could last for 30. risk and reward at the end of the day is what warlock is all about some enemies have high Shadow resist and will break out to fear nearly instantly and of course the more damage the enemy is taking during the fear the greater chance it has to break and that's even before you worry about whether random fear pathing will lead a mob into chain pulling others instead of going somewhere where you wanted it to Elite quests in general though feel very accessible to warlocks and are really part of the fun in playing a class which has such a reputation for being great solo as for regular questing by yourself warlocks have to also be among the best once again fear is an invaluable tool that allows you to dot up one mob Veer it away and then have it gradually rot down whilst you focus your attention on another it's a playstyle over class can do and it feels very satisfying to pull off whilst leveling or you can just play it safe and do one mob at once which is probably a better idea when you're doing hardcore to be fair getting the most out of your damage over time effects will also be a huge benefit to you and something that you should actively improve upon as you level a damage over time effect running its full duration is very Mana efficient and of course it being classic and they're being next to no bonus spell damage whilst you're leveling you have a pretty good idea of what to damage over time effect is actually going to be dealing in real time and you should definitely use that to your advantage so that's solo but what about when you group up how do warlocks do there I'd say they're solid and bring some good utility to a group as a whole first of all you can summon other players as of level 20 but in classic you have to be in the same instance to summon someone so if you're in the stock age the person you are trying to summon must also be inside the stockades but if you're just outside the instance portal in Stormwind you can summon a player from anywhere else in the open world even from done NASA's in calendar oh and of course one sharding classic equals one summon and you need two other people to perform each summon all the same Classics world is really big and it can save you so much time playing a warlock even though you already know everyone's gonna be expecting you to run to the instance first to summon whilst waiting for your group members to arrive at the instance inevitably you can also begin to farm shards because you can bet everyone wants a hellstone in hardcore and you have to make them individually and hand them out because there's no soul well and they are unique items did you know warlock is one of the least played classes at 60. surely it's just because they're deceptively challenging to level nothing else at play here right don't get me wrong all this warlock stuff is really good utility to have in a group but in classic it is just incredibly inconvenient and time consuming to do but hey it is what it is as part of a group you do have some other useful Buffs at your disposal though more than you would expect detecting visibility is very good in some late game dungeons such as Stratton dead or Diamond West both of these have invisible mobs patrolling all over the place for me the Imp is the go-to pair for dungeons it both gives blood packed which is a nice extra buffer of stamina as well as fire Shield which reflects a bit of damage when players are hit doesn't stack with thorns by the way but it's decent all the same you can also subjugate demons to have the major in combat banish Elementals or demons and dramatically slow the cast speed of enemies with curse of tongues if you needed an interrupter bonus stealth detection or dispels bring out the Fel Hunter you need single Target CC at range you can use the succubus for that this class has so much varied utility it almost feels like a support class that can do respectable damage as well the reasons I've marked the Warlock down in group content is applications for all this utility tend to be very Niche and damage over time effects tend not to be the most efficient in group content where they rarely get the benefit of their full duration oh and also the Healer of the group may not appreciate you using their Mana bar as a bonus Mana bar for Life tap even though it totally is all the same warlocks and groups can't really go wrong with them which brings us to survivability an area of the game where there is quite a bit to say so uh turns out for a class with a pet which is great at soloing stuff warlocks die a lot in fact based off of data from the devlog add-on warlocks are the least represented class in the game at 16. here's a snapshot from the 7th of June covering just under 81 000 character deaths warlocks have the lowest average level of death at 12.4 and are the only class in the game with less than a 60 chance to even make it to level 10 and by some margin they're only at 55.3 percent Warrior which is more than twice as popular as warlock compared to the total number of has a way better chance of not just hitting level 60 but higher level milestones in general every single non-faction specific class in the game has better recorded success stats in the hardcore challenge than warlock basically what I'm trying to say here is if you want to play something easy go pick a warrior if you want an actual challenge level a warlock alright memes aside though for real why are so few people finding success on this class well as the thing about pressing lifetap a bit too much and your voidwalker not exactly being the most reliable tank that we've already gone over on top of that if mobs actually start hitting you on the Warlock you are so squishy Mages can kite forever through the frost spells and have blink priests can shield and heal themselves warlocks have fear maybe drain life sacrifice also being a pet class there's a pretty good chance you've not been leveling your defense I know I go on about defense in these videos but if your defense is 15 levels or more off its cap at any given level you'll be vulnerable to crushing blows from mobs same level as you meaning they are often going to deal 150 percent of their normal melee damage you do have demon armor to beef up a little bit but you're still just taking so much damage if anything gets to you saying that you do have options for survivability and probably more than you would expect fear or howl of Terror are the obvious ones here as they will force one or more targets to run away somewhere there's two other things to know about fearing enemies though it increases their movement speed by 25 on most mobs this is just about noticeable certain enemies however have completely insane movement speed modifiers by themselves and will do a Usain Bolt impression if you fear them the other thing to know is that you can turn fear on and off without having to break it curse of recklessness makes the target immune to fear so you can fear them have them run away apply a curse of wreck they will run back to you and then you can sort to a different curse before they reach you and they will run away again this is called fear juggling curse of recklessness will also stop mobs from running in fair at low Health others are less risk of them chain pulling water breathing is another good tool you shouldn't forget about and it also gives the Warlock something useful to buff other people back with for a change if using a void Walker and you rip agar off them and your health bar is not looking so hot don't hesitate to use sacrifice this provides a huge Shield which in most cases will give you more than enough time to either run away or finish the fight re-summoning another voidwalker is not as bad as starting again that's for sure you eventually get death coil at 42 which is another great instant heal and a horror effect Shadow Ward is another good spell plenty of Shadow damage threats in classic don't forget about this and another one not to forget is spellstone you rarely think about this but it's held in your off hand and when used will dispel all magic effects on you as well as providing a large Shield against further magical damage it is Niche use but could be the Difference Maker especially versus Elementals whose melee attack often deals magic damage corresponding to their element oh and of course there's how Stone always have a health stone ready obviously I think all in all warlocks do have quite a few tools to survive it's just the overconfidence of pulling multiple mobs or an over Reliance on your demon to do the heavy lifting often proving fatal so is the Warlock faster level then well yes but only if you are willing to take on the risks that that entails such as juggling Mobs with fear and balancing your health and manner as well as that of your pet or you can just take it slow and let your Void walker build some aggro and then use darts and wand away it will vary on play style and how you go about playing your warlock but there is something about this class that just makes people want to go fast leveling speed wise warlock can be anywhere from moderate to really fast which brings us to Talent scenario of the game where I think there are two choices to be made based upon your preference there is a more traditional voidwalker pet tank spec where you use darts and wanding or something called drain tanking whereas the name suggests the war themselves is the one taking hits let's start off with a void walker build which will be the demonology focus specialization that goes all the way down to Soul link keep in mind you don't get your Void Walker until you've completed a quest at level 10 so up to that point in time you'll be using the much higher damage but way more fragile imp also in classic corruption has a two second Caster Baseline one of the first things we want to do is get it back to instant cast also we pick up three points in suppression early as it will give your reflection spells which include things such as drain life and fear a much better chance to hit after that over in the demo tree you pick up extra stamina and improved voidwalker so its torn feels a little bit better then fell domination into Master Summoner allow you to get a second demon out fast if you need it this can be useful in a bad situation where you've sacrificed one void Walker and then need to get out another one master demonologist gives you and your demon a unique effect depending on which one you're using with void occur it's 10 percent less physical damage which is really good after that you pick up demonic sacrifice which you'd only maybe use in dungeons before finally getting Soul link Soul Link in classic redirects 30 of damage taken by the Warlock to your demon and increases the damage of both by three percent this is the defining talent that makes demonology known for being a tanky warlock spec just keep your demon alive or you're going to go back to being incredibly squishy after that it's over into the Affliction tree to pick up some talents to improve the effectiveness of your damage over time effects this is the slower and more patient build even with you specking into improving your Void Walker at times it's the rat generation will feel bad and if you get some crits expect mobs to come running straight for you all the same the thing is about this spec is you do need to be in that slow and steady mindset if your demon dies and you can't summon another fast you could be in big trouble this build should be safer than the alternative but then again warlocks should in theory be one of these your classes to level and they just aren't personally I like the alternative spec that I'll go over here I will say it has a much harsher learning curve during the early and most dangerous levels but once you get the hang of it it's considerably faster than the demonology build and I think it's just as safe if not safer because you will be leveling your defense so this will be roughly the build we'll be looking at for drain tanking now the whole idea behind drain tanking is that you have an offensive pet which takes some damage during the start of a fight then soon after the Warlock takes threaten mainly deals damage through casting drain life and just face tanking the main demon you'll want for this build is the succubus however you don't get them until Level 20 through a pretty a long Quest chain prior to that it's either going to be using the Imp or a void Walker also drain tanking both needs a decent rank of drain life learned as well as some points in the fell concentration Talent or you just lose too much Mana from spell not back I wouldn't use rank 1 of drain life with this build it's just very Mana in a efficient for what it does at Rank 2 drain life learned at level 22 you can consider starting to use it to be honest your succubus will be carrying most fights and doing more damage than you at this level though by level 26 you'll have five points in foul concentration and should be drain tanking and by level 30 you get the rank 3 of drain life and the build really starts to scale up from here onwards in the talent tree at this point you go 5 out of 5 in to improve drain life Nightfall is optional I wouldn't consider it you just don't need the extra damage from the random Shadow bolt and then into siphon life and Shadow Mastery for tons more damage and self heals finally dark packed at 40 which turns your demon into your own personal Mana battery after that it's pretty standard talents in the demo tree to improve your tankiness the big problem with drain tanking is getting to a level where it starts being effective in the first place but if you get far enough your first respect is only one gold so it's at least worth a go to see what you think onto abilities then warlocks have an absolute ton of them to cover so what's good and what's not so good as per usual green is a level up where possible yellow is optional or don't fully level and red is a void the spells in green all feel pretty standard to me including Fel Steed remember warlocks get a free Mount at level 40. that's a pretty amazing gold saver and really nice to know that you will have a mount waiting for you dreadsteed is on the list too here that is from a big Quest chain at level 60 so don't expect to hit level cap and walk into an epic Mount straight away shadow bolts and drain life will depend on what specialization you're playing if I was drain tanking I wouldn't bother with Shadow Ball all that much to be honest plenty of abilities are optional to max out such as Hellfire or Reign of Fire being more group focused too then there's curses of Shadows curse of elements weakness stray Mana Soul fire searing pain a lot of things you could get by without but you can put ranks in them if you want to drain Soul rank 1 is fine for what it does it just gives you Soul shards and howl of Terror Rank 2 fears for 15 seconds instead of 10 but does not fear additional targets of course soulstone is not very useful when you're playing a hardcore character if you die you die no comebacks Firestone is just weird I'm not sure what it's meant to be it does increase your fire damage by a little bit and also adds a fire damage proxy on Main hand so fire melee warlocks that one's for you I guess Inferno both involves doing a very dangerous Quest and summons a highly unpredictable demon ritual of Doom is the exact same but even worse oh and ritual of Doom also sacrifices one of the people taking part in it so probably not a good idea to do this and though you may have been saving gold or not having to buy amount at 40 what you do have to buy is grimoires to upgrade your demons abilities so which ones are a priority depends on your demon of course but here's what I would do roughly speaking the Imp for me is the early game demon and the one you use in dungeons in dungeons I don't actually have its attack because they're just so fragile they die to absolutely any AOE whatsoever and they can be just as useful sitting in phase shift where they are immune to everything thing also your mp3 Mana for dark packs as well so based on that I would teach them phase shift the ranks of fire shield and blood pact if using a void Walker as your main pet you'll want to be upgrading its abilities a whole bunch priority on upgrading torment and sacrifice as your Void Walker's two best abilities suffering is a two minute cooldown AOE taunt which can be quite useful but uses a ton of your voidwalker's manner consume Shadows convert your voidwalker's Mana to health really inefficiently boydwalker's struggle for Mana in general and need it for taunting so this just isn't very good if you want to heal your voidwalker hell funnel bandage or just summon a new one on the succubus always take lesser invisibility it just keeps your pet from accidentally pulling things Lasher pain is okay it doesn't really do much damage for the Mana cost and I'd rather have that Mana for dark pact so I just take early ranks seduction is good pick that one up and soothing cases one you can avoid if your demon really needs a threat reduction something's probably going wrong somewhere on the Fel Hunter always take parano lawyer and at least one rank of devour magic and both ranks of spell lock further ranks of devour magic heal the fell Hunter for more when they consume a magical effect which is nice but not a big deal and spell lock Rank 2 increases the lockout duration from 6 seconds to eight painted blood just kind of doesn't really do anything in PVE your fell Hunter is absolutely not holding threats if you're using it as your main demon so you can skip this one let's finish on some macros and add-ons first of all you need to be able to control your demon Well normally in the game Pet attack is shift plus T but you can rebind it in a macro with Slash pet attack also you want something to be able to pull your pet back if it needs be you can either do this with Slash passive or via changing your keybinds directly through the tab labeled action bar under the keybinds menu if you scroll down a bit you'll see the pet action button binds while still there also when buying control 8 that's pet aggressive not something you want to accidentally turn on when playing hardcore you're going to be wondering so of course cast shoots you ask accidentally don't toggle your wand on and off and you can put a bunch of your demon abilities on the same macro just to save some bar space and have them all keybinded together as per usual two real go-to weak Horizon casters first of all one of them to show debuff timers you want to track your damage over time effects there's many ways to do this this is just one of them and Nan Shield will track your sacrifice Shield if you sacrifice your voidwalker something's probably gone wrong and you would want to know how much Shield you have left and that for me is the Warlock in hardcore wow definitely a class which is proving to be more of a challenge to level than you would have expected it to be but one that can bring so much utility and has a truly unique way to level through drain tanking let me know your thoughts on the Warlock in hardcore classic whether you've given it to go and if you found it to be as difficult as it's being made out to be thank you Mages in vanilla are probably the most overpowered class in the entire game they're the best Caster DPS end game incredible toolkits of burst and CC and PVP unquestionably the strongest AOE damage dealer free portals and teleports to get around the world free food and water and hey wouldn't you know it they're pretty good at leveling too saying that they are perhaps the only class in the game which has a totally unique way to level that nobody else can replicate and whilst this video will focus on more the traditional way to level we'll definitely be taking a look at the extent of what skill players can pull off on the Mage so whether it's Arcane Frost or fire let's take a look at the Mage in hardcore wow for a player starting off in hardcore whilst I don't think Mage is the safest class in the game it's still a reasonably good starting point if Mages have two weaknesses it's their incredibly low base health and the existence of a Mana bar now you could say every class with a Mana bar has some kind of issue with running boom but some classes deal a portion of their damage as melee such as a shaman and aren't totally reliant on their Mana some classes regenerate tons of Mana during a fight such as a priest or can just turn Health directly into Mana as the Warlock can Mages run out of that blue bar and unless you have a wand that's kind of it in time you will get evocation and manage M to boost your Mana pool back up but you don't always have those to fall back on getting to grips with how much damage your Mana pool can realistically translate into will separate those times from where you finish off a mob at five percent manner left and the times when you have to gradually Frost and over and wand them down a new applies to hardcore Mages also have some of the best defensive spells in the entire game particularly when you're specializing into the frost tree but we'll get on to that later if you want to play a pure damage dealing range character in classic Mages kind of hard to go wrong with though in terms of solo play Mage is simply amazing whilst they don't have the self-healing or tankiness of other classes they can just kite anything that can be slowed and rooted indefinitely whether you're Frost bolting from far away and keeping mobs at Arm's Reach or just trying to AOE down several mobs at once the Mage makes for a very efficient solo leveling machine the same goes for taking on Elites or tougher Quest mobs in general and though you will have to deal with some spell resists your toolkit has more than enough abilities to create distance between you and the enemy once again solo players also with the playstyle of the Mage can differ very heavily whilst leveling so the normal way to approach getting your Mage to 60 is much like any other class you pick a mob you use your main spell be it frostball Fireball what have you and you gradually get it down move on to the next mob and drink to refill your Mana as necessary and going down the route of mainly handling one mob at once is very safe especially when you realize most mode helps you engage are never going to reach you to actually deal any damage back the more advanced players however that want to make the use of the mage's full toolkit opt for AOE grinding this technique abandons questing in the early 20s in favor of picking high density fast respawn locations where the Mage can gather up as many mobs as possible and then AOE them down quickly through use of frost Nova flame strike Arcane explosion and blizzard the Mages toolkit of CC and extensive AOE damage makes them the only class that can entertain leveling in this way and if executed correctly it will always be much faster than questing there are issues with this playstyle though such as competition from others even just one other player can throw off making this worth it and secondly and much more importantly on Hardcore servers this playstyle is extremely dangerous you can get a few bad resists or mobs you can be dazed you can pull too many you can overestimate how much money you have left you can time your cooldowns wrong Mobs Can respawn on top of you and so on this is not a new player friendly way to play the game in fact I'd say getting to 60 through AOE grinding is probably the hardest Way You Can level all the way to end game even more so than on a warrior it's just very unforgiving when each pull is potentially deadly over such a long period of time I'd also keep in mind that you kind of need to be ahead of the pack for this to work casual play and AOE grinding will be too contested by other classes leveling normally saying all of this we did just have the official hardcore servers confirmed the other day so if you wanted to practice your AOE grinding The Unofficial error servers are there for that right now and I'm pretty confident in saying when the real servers drop the first solo level 60 will be a mage AOE grinding assuming they can get there without dying of course onto Group Play then so if I was putting a party together for quite literally any dungeon in the entire game the first thing I would want is a mage this class is just so over tuned for group play they get free food and water for party members assuming we can trade that is incredible AOE damage profile solid single targets and interrupt sheep the list just goes on and on they can also recover bad polls like no other class in the game cam kiting back through an improved blizzard will give people enough time to heal up and regenerate Mana or just maybe even get to the dungeon exit if it's near enough the biggest risk to the Mage in a group is how much damage you can potentially deal if you throw a flame strike into an Arcane explosion on multiple mobs on the pole no tank in the game will be able to stop them from turning around and hitting you in the face at which point you're gonna be reminded how low your health bar is playing a mage I'd always start off with a few Frost bolts into the main target before starting to AOE it is vanilla after all there's only so much a tank can do to save a DPS that's pretending threats isn't a thing onto survivability then can this clown has to easily get out of a difficult situation yes yes it can even without considering talent's Mage has a lot going for it you don't think of it initially but even Frost armor is a purely passive slow to movement and attack speed anytime Amelia tank hits the Mage other classes have to press a button to achieve something like that with Mage yeah it just happens on its own you don't even have to do anything special to run away most of the time due to frost armor your basing movement speed will be higher than whatever is hitting you most of the time it's kind of overpowered if you think about it and then we have Frost Nova a short cooldown AOE route which gives you more than enough time to outrun pretty much anything in the entire game rust and firewatch shouldn't be forgotten about against enemies that deal these types of damage and remember water and fire Elementals despite looking as though they're mailing you are actually dealing Elemental damage there's Mana Shield too though it does drain your Mana extremely fast and only stops physical damage in classic and the last resort when you're running this one that example magic is also very useful when solo again against Elementals it's reducing how much damage You Take by more than you would expect of course there is Blink the classic Mage utility spell teleporting you a short distance forwards as well as removing roots and slows and then we get on to talents boiler what we'll be talking about for the talents part of the video I guess but Frost is just amazing frostbite makes it so all your Frost abilities including Frost armor have a 15 chance to root enemies this route does not cause diminishing returns of itself and it can proc back to back ice block is a huge defensive ability for the Mage removing all debuffs and making you immune to damage for its duration in classic there is no hypothermia debuff from using ice block though again you can do it back to back also you can't ice block and jump off a ledge to land safely for some reason you just get stuck in the air so yeah don't go relying on doing that speaking of Defying Gravity slow fall can't be used on allies and it also needs a reagent called a light feather which are not sold on reagent vendors but found in the world so if you get some of these do hold on to them finally at 40 there is ice barrier which is a good version of Mana Shield as it blocks all damage on a short cooldown and you can reset every single one of these Frost abilities with cold snap so yeah Mage kinda op as mentioned earlier manobar is really the only issue I'd be super careful about using Mana Shield when running it does delete your Mana pool really fast to block a relatively small amount of damage which can sometimes leave you um as other things which could help you escape such as blink or Nova come off of cooldown also as a mage you're not taking direct hits too often so your defense will not be capped for your level meaning even yellow mobs are likely going to be landing crushing blows which will deal 150 percent of normal damage when things do get in melee range your health bar usually drops pretty fast all the same age has a whole tool kit of ways to escape from a bad situation it's just about picking the right one for the right occasion so then is the Mage Fast 2 level depends I think if you're going through the single Target frostbolt playstyle it's faster than some but nowhere near the fastest AOE grinding solo is the fastest route to 60 but is also very high risk and you need to be ahead of the pack or uncontested for it to really work even doing something in between the two play Styles where you occasionally AOE but mostly single Target is still fairly good Mage has the capability to be one of the fastest levelers in the game but it's really down to how you play the class onto talents for leveling then so what are we running I think there's a lot of flexibility here the only kinda odd one out is Arcane so in vanilla arcane's main damage dealing spells are Arcane explosion which is great obviously on AOE and Arcane missiles which is a not so great if you're really leveling going down the Arcane tree and using Arcane spells you better be doing a challenge run or something it just doesn't have the damage fire brings or the UT reality and damage that Frost brings that's why it's not really seen and is more of a supportive specialization to the other two talent trees speaking of the other two trees though I do rate fire early game a certain key talents that make Frost incredibly powerful are missing for a while you'll also find that fire can easily finish off mobs before they have a chance to reach you even without the slows from frostball this spec is much more focused with dealing with one mob at once however and at around the level 26 to 30 Mark I would consider re-rolling to frost you get a new rank of frostbolts at 26 and by that time you have points in vital talents such as frostbite as well as points in ice shards and shatter this means you can just Blast away with your Frost bolts one mob at a time and make things very safe and very easy for yourself the problem with the Mage talent tree is you're kind of spoiled for Choice there are very few dead talents compared to other classes and wherever you put points it's probably gonna work out pretty well I will say for more group Focus play or for AOE grinding that the core talents in your Frost tree will shift around quite a bit as blizzard is now a key source of your damage as well as cone of cold contributing a lot more for me overall on the Mage fireworks fine early but once Frost comes online it's really hard to deny the combination of burst damage slows and roots not to mention excellent additions to survivability from ice block Ice barrier and cold snap which you really value on a one life character much like their talents nearly all the abilities the Mage can train are pretty useful bring colored abilities are ones are Level whenever I get the chance yellow is optional or I wouldn't train to Max Rank and I'd usually say red is a void but there aren't really many abilities which are totally useless on the Mage there is a few things I want to say about what's shown here though punja water rank 7 is from a quest in diamall and conjure food rank 7 is from a Tome dropped in Stratton dead by archivist galford you can only get to the rank 6 through your trainers but late game characters will be able to pick both of these up portals will really depend on whether you're grouping up in your playthrough if you see them being useful definitely get them roster Nova gains minor extra damage when leveled up the root duration Remains the Same so it's fine to use rank one for me if there were abilities to skip amplify magic has Niche uses as does Scorch Arcane missiles and Fireball won't see much action at Max rank assuming you're Prospect and Mana Shield feels a little redundant once you start being able to Talent into ice barrier speaking of ice barrier it's on the list here at the top right of course this is a talented ability not Baseline but you should always level up talented abilities whenever you can they're cheap anyway so why not those are just my thoughts on what to get on the Mage though the toolkit as a whole is very strong so you've got to need plenty of gold to level up all your spells moving on we don't really have much weapon progression to talk about for the Mage yes ones are nice and everything but you just don't rely on them as much as other spellcasters do ones are there for that moment when Omar has just not enough hell for you to Warrant using a full spell on it either that or very early game where ones are just kind of really op assuming you can get your hands on one that is so instead let's talk about stats quickly it's pretty simple spirit is nice for Passive Mana regen and health regeneration but you're casting too often for the five second rule to kick in your key stats are going to be intellect and stamina green items that roll of the eagle should always be a particular interest for Mages and ideally you will put stamina and intellect on every item that you're wearing leveling as they will give you the biggest buffer of health and Mana meaning more room for errors spell resist all that kind of stuff also in classic armor can roll secondary stats too such as of Frozen wrath these are purely offensive items or going any of the stats for raw spell power in that particular School whilst finding an item like this is extremely rare they will boost your damage noticeably and as you will experience during leveling there's practically no gear that has spell power on it at all until end game so if you find them they're worth using just don't equip too many of them you still want a decent health bar next we have macros and add-ons so it's not really either of the above but always have frostbolt rank one on your bar somewhere sometimes you just need a brief slow to stop mobs running in fear to others or so you can keep kiting or when you're running um it's just very useful whether you are Frost or not you can do the same with cone of cold another good spell to have down ranked and frost Nova's the same story even if you did hypothetically spend gold to upgrade it you're also spending more Mana to do a very small extra bit of damage rank 1 is fine to use so they're macros past shoot use this on any Caster with a wand it stops you from accidentally toggling your one firing on and off I find it really useful you're going to be making a bunch of your own food and water and you can cast sequence them to make both on one button just replace this with the correct name for whatever ranks you're using Mages candy cursor this comes in useful now and again this macro will decrease you if no one's targeted or an ally if you Mouse over them I like having counter spell on Mouse over two similar kind of idea to D curse sometimes you don't want to swap Target but do want to interrupt add-on-wise I don't have a ton which I would really say I specifically use on the Mage I have two weak auras that are useful first up having debuffs on name plates there's a lot of ways to achieve this through various add-on packs or name plates so it's just a suggestion really but this is the weak Aura I use to achieve it another one I really like is Nan Shield it gives you a visual indicator of how much Shield you have left it also shows separate Shields from your Wards Mana barrier and even trinkets modern Target frame is another useful one it will among other things display when enemies are casting so you know when to interrupt and finally omnicc shows ccfx over the affected targets portraits including interrupts again I find this a good visual indicator of what is going on and I think that just about wraps up everything I have to to say about the Mage it really is a class where you can push the limits of what is possible within the game or just play pretty safe and sound as in your player to the class do watch your health and Mana bars more so than other classes it's not so much mistakes that get Majors killed it's just overestimating how powerful you actually are so whether you're Solo or looking to group up more the Mage in vanilla is truly a class that shines in all aspects of the game from PvP raiding and of course hardcore leveling all right so you've chosen the path of the warrior to undergo the hardcore Challenge on arguably its most difficult setting and see if you have what it takes it's no secret that despite Warriors having a legacy of being god-tier at everything a 10 game drawing vanilla the leveling Journey turns that experience entirely on its head with a general lack of get out of jail free cards and CC sub-optimal gearing choices and a rage bar which is just never full worry a life from 1 to 60 ain't easy in this video we'll be breaking down the warrior in hardcore classic wow going over their strengths and weaknesses and hopefully helping you keep your health bar above one all the way from your starting zone to the end game so let's start where we usually do is this class new player friendly it kind of goes without saying no Warrior is not new player friendly at all most deaths for players in hardcore well tend to occur around level 14 you know that's when you come out of your start zones and go into the early game leveling hubs such as Westfall dark Shore the Barons and so on a big reason why and something to remember is that starter Zone mobs are very nice to you they're sometimes neutral meaning they don't attack on site and they run slow enough for you to get away without having to do anything special but once you're past these zones you don't get that special treatment anymore which is why especially on the warrior if things are not looking so good you need to get out of there sooner rather than a later another thing I want to mention which may or may not be of use depending where we're at with servers but on the classic error servers at the moment there are currently guilds raiding you know what Guild's raiding means that means World Buffs are going to be dropping if you get an Oni buff on the level 1 Warrior it is completely broken and gives you two hours of absolute god mode when you've just made your character I guess it's a bit of a gray area but there's nothing stopping you from doing it if you want to and it's not as if there's World Buffs going out every hour now like there was during classic anyway either way if Warrior is your first pick in hardcore you're definitely going in at the deep end and you really need to learn the value of taking things slow keeping your health bar High between poles and not underestimating just how fast things can go wrong so how does the warrior perform solo then again not terribly well this class is very reliant on other people supporting it as well as gearing up heavily two things which you don't have much access to during the leveling phase of the game Warrior's ability to take on higher level mobs multiple mobs or Elites is the sketchy at best if going into a tough poll you'll always want to pull rage before doing so this is just going to hit something else beforehand to ensure that your rage bar is full so when you charge in you can instantly for example Thunderclap sweeping strikes and heroic strike in the first Global this will give you a good head start on what would otherwise have taken you a few seconds to achieve also if using a slow two-handed weapon don't under estimate hamstring kiting if you need to this is just running between a mob back and forth between each melee hit to ensure that you're trading one for one certain mods hit really fast so this can be beneficial to do so and of course if you're gonna do something crazy have one of your 30 minute cooldowns ready to go those being retaliation recklessness and shield wall I think for leveling and just for hardcore in general to be honest the most useful one by quite some margin is retaliation it gives you 30 charges of instantly counter-attacking an enemy when they hit you this is really powerful against multiple mobs or just evening the ground against a tough Elite oh and the final thing not to take for granted is how many debuffs the warrior can apply between demo shout Thunderclap and thunder armor you can really even up the playing field if you apply all these but if you do find yourself grouping up for dungeons or what have you the tables really do completely turn Warriors go from often struggling to being one of the best classes in the game with an unlimited resource in Rage and double deputyon rages generation from damage taken and dealt they start to show why they end up being so overpowered at endgame one thing I will say is that you should expect to be tanking more often than not in group content now as Paladin and Shaman can do great in dungeons there's a total of two classes in the game which actually have a taunt button and you're playing one of them on top of that no one really plays a full-on tank spec while leveling in vanilla because being outside of a group they do absolutely zero damage and as we'll talk about soon Warriors can tank very effectively just by playing a pretty standard arm spec so do be prepared to tank level up a one-hand weapon of choice so it will actually hit and keep a shield in your bag too which brings us to survivability which is an interesting topic for the warrior though your choice of getting out of a bad situation early game is you press hamstring and then you run away and that's kind of it as just mentioned you should definitely aim to to carry a one-hander and a shield as much as you possibly can having the ability to block whilst running away is a passive bit of Defense which you should not Overlook on top of that at level 10 you'll get a quest to unlock defensive stance and if you're running away and you already have hamstring active do consider using this as you'll also take 10 less damage passively whilst it's active I'm also gonna have to give a good mention to strafing and a leashing rules here for the warrior it's a thing which is good to know in general but especially so for this class so in short mobs in this game will have a set timer for how long they will chase you depending on various factors such as their level and distance they've run from their spawn point if you're engaging a mob in any way so demo shout hamstring Auto attack what have you it will constantly be resetting this invisible leash timer and will keep chasing you in many events for way further than you think it should we've all had that moment where you can't believe how far something has run after you this is why that happens so when running you must stop hitting whatever is chasing you back get a hamstring on them and pray for good RNG with blocks and so on when running it's also very important that you are strafing or strafe jumping the aim of this is to be running away from a mob whilst continually facing it you can only be dazed when hit from behind and when mobs are facing you you can still block Parry Dodge and all that good stuff so if you get into a habit of learning strafing and strafe jumping early it's useful for every class in the game and on the warrior is a bit of mitigation and defense in your toolkit which you really can't overlock once you hit Level 30 and get berserker stance you can use intercept as a getaway tool on practically anything in the direction you are going in especially on Critters if you can see them an intimidating shout Works a bit strangely too it will cause your target to be feared where they stand for 8 seconds and 5 other nearby Targets to run in fear if you hit that main target that's standing in place it will always instantly break the fear effect however running targets will take some damage before the fear breaks though your ultimate live through nearly anything ability is Shield wall this Hefty 30 minute cooldown requires both defensive stance and a shield equipped and it reduces all damage taken by 75 for 10 seconds also on the warrior in particular I'd make a point to keep your first aid at the highest level it can be though being classic first aid is a bit non-linear to level to go above 150 you'll need to go buy a Tome from a vendor for Alliance though and strong guard keep in the arathi highlands and in DOS swallow Marsh for The Horde here note that for a low level both of these zones are very dangerous so do it at your own risk but you'll have to go there eventually they will also sell tones for heavy silk bandage and mageweave bandages buy both of these they're pretty cheap the train above 225 at level 35 or higher again you've got to go to a specific trainer they're in either more for the alliance or the arathi highlands for The Horde this trainer will also be alone the final few tiers of bandages heavy Mage Reaver 240 runecroft at 260 and heavy room cough at 290. it's a good idea to store excess cloth in the bank until you've leveled up your first aid just so you aren't wasting potential levels by making bandages either way Warriors do have ways to get out of sticky situations they just aren't as powerful or simple as what some other classes have access to as for the speed of leveling well Warrior isn't going to be breaking any records put it like that low and steady is the name of the game taking your time healing up between poles and respecting how much damage your enemies can put out all add up to a class that will see a longer than average time to ding 60. on two talents now so if there's one thing to say about warrior in hardcore it's Welsh meta Talent builds can work well sometimes you get good RNG and the game gives you an amazing weapon and when this happens I think you just play into the weapon that you you've got we will talk weapon progression in a moment but having something good to swing at enemies is the most important thing on the Warrior by far I would say Fury is the less common leveling build for the warrior though is an Avenue that I would consider if I got a good quality rare weapon early on it does have issues though which is why it's a less played such as you don't get berserker stunts until Level 30 well wind is at level 36 and bloodthirst is at 40. this means a ton of your time will be spent in Battle Stance prior to that and the big bonus from being a Battle Stance is overpower but since Fury ideally wants to use one-handers you aren't going to be getting the most out of it as fury weapons tend to hit more often but deal less damage compared to two handers also dual wielding incurs a way higher hit chance penalty compared to using a two-hander meaning rage issues are going to be even more noticeable than they already will be there's kind of this thing where you go two hand Fury until you get higher levels and good one-handers but at this point you might as well just to be playing arms all the same if you are lucky and get a rare one-hander rally I'd go with something along the lines of this notably Fury gets piercing howl as well as death wish for a nice extra bit of utility and a proper DPS cooldown not many classes get one of them Laurie is one of the big talents that will add a solid bit to your DPS and bloodthirst is another instant attack to press it does scale off your attack power though which whilst leveling is not going to be all that high but it's better than just Auto attacking but I would personally go for an arms build to join the leveling phase of the game it also starts out very slowly just like Fury does but that's kind of warrior for you they don't get many damage dealing abilities for quite some time and your early game is going to be a lot of Thunderclap thundering and hoping that overpower procs this build is able to go into improved overpower giving it a very strong chance to crit as well as impale and deep wounds to make those crits count a little bit more later in the tree we get sweeping strikes allowing you to consistently deal with multiple targets and at the bottom bottom of the tree is Mortal strike a hard-hitting instant attack that reduces healing taken by 50 for 10 seconds as for which weapon specialization to go into again I would consider playing the weapon that you get I prefer axes over swords personally the extra crit does start to get very noticeable and more crit means more Rage which means more of everything else mace is okay though it's random stun does diminish with itself and polar is just in a bad place in the talent tree where you have to waste points somewhere to get it in the fury tree get cruelty piercing howl and enrage the other talents are kind of up to what you prefer I would though avoid improved cleave it's a bit of a bait Talent since it increases the bonus damage on cleave not the total damage in practice this means it does about 60 more damage at Max rank this arm spec is also great for tanking dungeons right from the first few in the game to getting towards some of the late game the main thing it has going for it is that you can charge in Thunderclap sweeping strikes Berserker stance Circa rage Whirlwind and then defensive stance and put your sword and shield on this gives you a really good threat lead on pretty much any pack in the game this does depend on the pack of mobs your gear your healer of course if things feel a bit risky or shaky take it slower onto abilities then water level and what to avoid fortunately for the warrior pretty much everything they can train is useful to some degree as per usual green abilities are the ones I will level whenever I get the chance to Yellow are optional or I would not level them up fully as the gold cost isn't worth it and red is a void of course Warrior learns defensive and Berserker stances through quests which are available at levels 10 and 30 respectively and they should be something you get done when you get the chance to before level 30 or so in general abilities are just kind of cheap and are worth getting almost whatever they do and Warrior picks up a ton of utility from various shouts Buffs and debuffs Warrior also has quite a few abilities which gain absolutely tiny benefits from leveling up intercept Rank 3 does 40 more damage than rank 1 and has the same lengths done geobash rank 1 does 6 damage Rank 3 does 45 damage they both interrupt for the same amount of time leave mocking blow and pommel are all the same story I also have mortal strike on the talent order here of course this is not a baseline ability but you level your talents whenever you get the chance to do so and they're always cheaper than normal abilities too the single ability I can realistically say there's not any point leveling is slam your somewhat limited rage pull is better spent on pretty much anything else next on two weapons as a warrior you need a good one so here's what to look out for early game for the alliance the dead mines offers multiple chances at a good two-hander such as the task Masters ax or smite's Hammer alternatively the quest to defeat Edwin Van Cleef gives a very good staff as well the horde's counterpart early game dungeon the whaling Caverns also gives a very good weapon called the Crescent staff if you haven't been able to run dungeons or just haven't had much luck with early game drops there are two noteworthy weapons from vendors in the game the merciless ax and Executioner's sword both of these are pretty expensive early game but could carry you through many many levels these are sold by either blacksmiths or random traveling Traders throughout the world so if you see a unique locking vendor give their stock a check and see what they have the big mid-game weapon to aim for has to be from the Wario class quest awarding one of three weapons the most commonly picked is the Whirlwind acts due to it having the slowest attack speed and it's scaling best with your instant attacks such as Whirlwind or Mortal strike this is not an easy quest to solo and most people will take it on towards level 40. if and when you are thinking about going for this do check a guide as it's a multiple part quest which I won't have time to fully cover in this video alternatively as an alliance only sorry hordes there is a quest line starting with brother Anton in Stormwind which eventually leads to in the name of the light which Awards bone biter this ax could realistically last you until level 60 it's that good unless you want to run dungeons there is a pretty good chance that you're going to be rocking a green weapon for the majority of your leveling Journey it might be a little bit riskier but often it's well worth the trouble on two macros and add-ons now add-ons first so I don't have much Warrior specific to be honest I use weapon swing timer so I can see when my damage is going to be going out Doom cooldown pulse is another add-on that shows abilities in the center of your screen briefly when they come off of cooldown which can be good for seeing when abilities come off of cooldown in your other stances and a threat meter is good too for dungeons especially when you're tanking onto a few macros then one big thing to know here is that if you have abilities on your main bar they're gonna automatically swap when you change stance so you don't need to create a macro with stance conditionals I find there are enough abilities for each stance on the default bar once you hit higher levels so I ended up moving a bunch of them onto macro instead that's just how I do things though also try and have abilities that do the same thing on the same place on your bar between stances for example overpower and revenge share a cooldown between battle and defensive stance and Whirlwind is your extra DPS button for circus stance I always have these all on the same button locking blowing Battle Stance and disarming defensive are another example I also have all my 30 minute cooldowns on the same button though this time their macroed were depending on your stance it will use the corresponding one same deal with charge and intercept and just have intercepts somewhere on your screen where you can see when it's coming off of cooldown I do the same with interrupts they also share a cooldown so put them on the same button you should also have something to swap between your sword and board fast and putting on your two-hander and you should always have a starter tank macro somewhere in one of your abilities using bloodrage also puts you in combat during classic for its duration I use a cancel or a macro in case I want to get rid of the persistent effect and just drop combat and I think that's about all I have for the warrior its reputation enjoying the leveling phase is very much deserved though once you start to get past those early levels and into 30 and Beyond the class really does start to pick up and of course Landing a good rare weapon early on and perhaps finding the occasional World buff or two are both very big deals if you played Warrior drawing classic you'll remember how insane they get to end game and if you can ever get a chance while leveling to try out World Buffs and a rare weapon against Green mobs it'll be like a little reminder of what they used to be like either way the warrior is always in demand at level cap so if you plan to go the distance or to just see if you can the warrior is a tough but rewarding class to play on Hardcore thank you the Paladin the counterpart to The Horde exclusive Shaman and one of the classes with the most fanatical fan bases from Tyrion forgering to Uther the lightbringer Deeds of this class have been ingrained into World of Warcraft from the very beginning though during World of Warcraft classic the Paladin was often resigned to a Healer role during the end game the far more leveling focused tile core challenge opens up New Paths of viability for this alight wielding Warrior today we check out the Paladin in hardcore wow so you're thinking of giving this hardcore Challenger go and uh a bit more of an alliance player does the Paladin make for a good starting point in short yes they are arguably the most safe melee class in the game whilst others have to deal with leather armor or no self-healing the Paladin gets the best of every world with the ability to equip the heaviest armor types and a ton of not only healing but to extremely strong defensive abilities from an early level the Paladin though is also notorious for one thing in classic and that's being um kind of simple to play it's not too much of an exaggeration to say by about level six you've seen the basic rotation that will carry you to level 60. you run up to something you press judgment if you have the Mana apply a new seal and just melee them down it's kind of like the melee counterpart to a priest because you sure spend a lot of time swinging away with your two-handed weapon in between catching up with shows on Netflix you may occasionally need to press Holy Light if your health dips below 30 percent which will bring it back to near fall before resuming your right to collect gameplay you also have a whole host of Buffs and utility Spells at your disposal which make the Paladin very difficult to lock down in fact the only real weakness is getting spell locked on holy because pretty much everything you do apart from swinging your weapon is a holy spell and there's no worse feeling than losing a hardcore Paladin when you have multiple different ways to survive just about kind of thing but we'll get into that when talking survivability so how does the Paladin perform solo questing then well they are a very capable class with a clear weakness being that they're strictly melee to deal any form of damage outside of exorcism and Hammer of Wrath that is the Paladin needs to be towed to toe to stay in the fight against Undead you do gain extra benefits from some parts of your toolkit you're one of the few classes in the game that can hard see see Undead with a fear effect from turn Undead holy rap hits nearby Undead or demons for heavy holy damage but it does cost a bunch of Mana as well as having a two second cast time and a one minute cooldown the cast time tends to be a bit of a problem here the whole point of the spell is to hit a lot of targets and spell knockback can make that hard exorcism spices up the right click action when facing Undead or demons instantly hitting them for moderate damage but it doesn't guarantee quitting classic by the way that's a Rafa the Lich King thing it can be used a manner allowing when leveling but it's certainly not about button that you can afford to press off of cooldown paladins and classic also technically have an executing Hammer of Wrath but uh wow this ability kind of sucks it deals holy damage which doesn't scale with your strength it has a one second cast down so You're vulnerable to getting interrupted and not back on your cast oh and when you cast a spell it Force research your melee swing timer I remember in TBC playing a rap Paladin the tier 64 set increased the damage on Hammer of Wrath and it was still completely unusable because it reset your swing time and it also costs so much Mana you could half the Mana it costs and it would still be questionable it's pretty much only ever used if a target has to die before they chain pull or if you're gonna sit down and drink anyway anyways back on track when playing solo against Elites the Paladin is very strong for reasons that are going to be well mentioned many times throughout the video they were either male or play Tama have strong healing and tons of defensive abilities whilst you aren't exactly bursting down enemies in a matter of seconds they aren't doing that to you either and when fights go long the Paladin tends to come out on top in terms of solo play the Paladin is self-sufficient for a melee class and one that can find a ton of success in this area or gameplay and when you group up they only get better in a group setting the Paladin's full toolkit of utility is Unleashed as well as though now having more viable options when it comes to how you want to play the game in fact many would say paladins are the Difference Maker as for why Alliance is seen as the better performing faction during the end game of PVE in WoW classic just remembering classic your blessings only last for five minutes and you better believe Mr Warrior DPS God X is going to ask for a new might every five minutes like he's trying to 99 pass in Scarlet Monastery or something also fun fact up to patch 1.9 in original vanilla wow that's aq40 the 15-minute greater blessings that buff everyone of the same class did not exist and paladins in raids were unironically spend most of their time applying 5-minute blessings to to individual players also you can only have one blasting active at once things such as blessing of Freedom or protection are also well blessings so you have to rebuff someone after having used a utility blessing on them I played a holy paler early on during raiding and wow classic and I remember this all too well but this is more end game stuff isn't it in a group during leveling the Paladin can also Flex into several different roles which they struggled to do during the end game most players are going to be specked into the retribution tree to improve their damage but you can very much throw on some intellect gear and be able to heal just fine or even tank if you want to a bit similar to the shaman Paladin tank gets memed on in classic due to their lack of a tauntability but during the leveling phase of the game they work just fine there is one caveat to that however and that is consecration is not a baseline ability in classic and you need to have invested 11 points into the holy Tree in order to pick up this spell and if you are going to tank you kinda do want the creation the whole strength of the Paladin as a tank is their good AOE threat and without consecration you're doing moderate single Target threat and then trying to chase down mobs who will be running after your healer the Paladin's threat remember is an early entirely generated through dealing holy damage thanks to righteous Fury also exorcism is wholly damage and when there are demons or Undead in a dungeon this ability might as well be a taunt though if anything when tanking on a paladin try and prioritize dungeons with these enemy types but whatever role you're taking on in a group is a paladin everyone is benefiting hugely from you just existing by the nature of how much utility you offer through blessings and auras paladins true to their selfless nature may not themselves be the star of the show but enable other classes to truly Excel onto survivability can this class get out of a difficult situation well put it like this according to the hardcore rules on The Unofficial servers at the moment the Paladin is the only class in the game to have a spell combo and as it's deemed so powerful that it would trivialize the latter portion of the leveling Challenge and that is the bubble Hearth Divine Shield is first learned at level 34 enabling 10 seconds of immunity to everything even if you're just popping this to heal up or Escape it's already an incredible ability imagine ice block for 10 seconds but you can still move and act during it but you cannot guarantee bubble Hearth with rank 1 Divine Shield the global cooldown is one and a half seconds of course so you need 11 and a half seconds to pull off this maneuver it is doable at rank one by the way you just need an enemy with a slow enough attack speed and to time it correctly but once you get Rank 2 Divine Shield at level 50 and its duration is increased to 12 seconds it's a guaranteed escape from any situation the game throws at you and that is undeniably extremely powerful I mean getting to 50 in hardcore is already an achievement and most people don't do that in the first place but still I should also mention there is a spell with a different name not not to be confused with Divine Shield called Divine protection you get ranks of this at level 6 and 18 similar to Divine Shield they make you immune to all attacks for six and eight seconds respectively but you cannot attack while they are active and they are both purely defensive in nature Divine Shield is a direct upgrade from Divine protection you know what else Paladin gets which is totally absurd a lay on hands a one-hour cooldown ability which uses all of your remaining Mana to restore 100 of your maximum health and you get this ability at level 10 gaining a second health bar once per hour that is pretty good it can be used on allies too you get a hammer of Justice too stunning enemies for up to 6 seconds on a one minute cooldown paladins might not have a spell interrupt so this is what you get instead blessing of Freedom makes your immune to movement impairing effects there are very few ways to Escape Routes such as physical Nets in the game so this is a great thing to have blessing of protection is good if you're caught without bubble up who makes the targets immune to physical damage and you will also get cleanse which removes magic disease and poisons in one button that's the majority of the debuffs you have to worry about and just gone in one button you can even throw a judgment of Justice on a low Health enemy that runs in fear to stop it from chain pulling this interaction is very rarely used but in a dungeon with High mob density such as The Stockade this can be a good thing to keep in mind the Paladin is built to be a defensive Fortress to break through very much putting offensive capability second onto talents then where is it best to invest your points I think it can depend on what you want out of your Paladin the way I see it is there are two main options one that's more safe and allows you to tank group based content and the other that's more focused on damage and solo play the big difference between the two builds is the priority with which you pick up consecration here's the first build for example where up to level 20 you're specking into the holy tree despite not being a Healer this gives you some extra intellect allowing for a few more heals 10 to be better than strength and spell knockback prevention on Heels definitely don't overlook this Talent when you get concentration or at level 22 you can guarantee have no spell knock back on holy which means even if you have three enemies attacking you you can just throw on a hill and then keep fighting or start running it feels as though the talents in the retribution tree are pretty standard when it comes to leveling you don't really have the manner to judge on cooldowns So I leave this out pursuit of justice is great because you're going to be spending a lot of time running so this will be speeding you up significantly seal of command adds the chance to proc an extra melee swing on hit instantly dealing holy damage this ability scales best with slow two-handed weapons which we'll talk about later thanks to Tiara is a bit of a bait talent and doesn't really seem worth it to me when playing Rhett your holy damage output is quite minor compared to physical on your melee swings and even when tanking and using consecration this Aura is quite minor going two out of two into improve retribution Aura is going to give you far more damage in the long run here's an example if we take consecration Rank 3 learned at level 40 it does 192 damage so sanctity or is adding about 19 extra damage over its duration per enemy hit retribution Aura Rank 3 learned at level 36 does 12 damage Baseline if we add on improved retora it's now doing 18 damage so for Ratt Aura to be better than sanctity here a mob has to hit you four times or more and that's going to happen pretty much every single combat ever also retribution or a scale super hard if you're against fast attacking enemies so basically go rat Aura after that it's down the tree into Vengeance and finally you pick up repentance giving the Paladin another way to interrupt human enemies or just giving themselves a chance to heal up in the protection tree don't really have too much to say about this you always go read out here because you're using retribution Aura and bonus hit chance is very nice to have the alternative build really isn't all that different it just goes into retribution first and picks up consecration way later it's not like you're going to be using consecration out of dungeons all that much anyway it costs a lot of Mana for what it does and it's really about the threat generation not the bonus damage also as a side note if you did want to heal dungeons while leveling it should be fine even if you aren't prioritizing going full out into the holy tree save up gear that has intellect early on train your ranks of flash of light and holy light and just go for it even without some of the key holy talents they're still a good enough healer for leveling content onto abilities water level and what's a skip so on the graphic here green is a level where possible yellow is optional or don't level fully and red is the void the majority of the things that paladins can do tend to be useful and worth putting points into so there's going to be a lot of green here a big benefit to playing the Paladin is of course the fact you get a mount for free the moment you hit Level 40 that's going to save you a ton of gold and ensure you always have the money to level up your Spells at level 60 there is a big quest to get your charger this one is not free however and it would actually be very impressive to see on a hardcore character since it involves a lot of late game dungeon content and gold farming there are quite a few abilities here in yellow which fall into the optional category resistance auras are great but leveling wise tend to only be useful here and there particularly when fighting Elementals deal of wisdom and liked how Niche uses mainly in dungeons for when you're tanking and you know that threat is okay divine intervention is the ultimate optional ability do you take the chance to save someone else at the cost of your own character or do you leave it on a trainer and not have that decision blessing of sacrifice and light are good if you want to heal content otherwise not really needed you only want to skip is redemption because well it's hardcore mode isn't it and you need to do a quest to get Redemption anyway Honestly though a big deal with choosing what to level up is solely based off wanting amount to level 40 and you don't have to be careful with saving up even if you're thinking long term about an epic Mount you aren't going to be doing that without a ton of grinding at level 60 anyways so perhaps Paladin is a class where you just throw gold at whatever you feel like leveling the Paladin is a class where a ton of your time is going to be spent swinging away so keeping an eye out for good weapon upgrades is very important early game there are several vendors who have powerful two-handed weapons such as the heavy Spike mace or the Executioner sword look out for the wandering Merchant Antonio Pirelli between goldshire and red Ridge for this there's a paladin exclusive quest for a two-handed weapon which will last for a very long time name of Aragon's fist this is a quest that will have you traveling all over Azeroth including collecting items from the dead Minds shadowfang keep and black fathom's deep it's quite a trip but well worth it if you're a dungeon enjoyer and want to guarantee getting an amazing weapon as a bonus the king of two-handed weapons on Alliance though is from the quest in the name of the light this can be done around level 40 involves a full clear of the Scarlet Dungeons and will reward bone biter this weapon has a great 3.4 speed tons of strength and nice bit of stamina too you can very much use this until near enough level cap if you don't manage to find an upgrade from dungeons definitely go out of your way to get this one done on two macro Zone add-ons then for macros you want something to swap to a shield and one-hander and then back to your two-hander even if you aren't tanking dungeons Shields are free mitigation that you should use when running away you also want start attack somewhere in your rotation to ensure you're hitting enemies as soon as possible there is a start attack function built into judgment but you don't always use that at the start of a fight it's up to you where it goes but put it somewhere the Paladin has tons of utility and I like Mouse over macros so I don't have to change my main target this macro will Target the Paladin if no friendly unit is eligible or an ally if you have the mouse overed you can apply this to Blessings cleanse and so on a radons there's only two things I would want on the Paladin first of all a swing timer the main reason I would want this is to know when to Time Heals so I can begin the cast just after a swing and not in the middle of one second of course is Pally power if you ever do dungeon or just group content in general this makes tracking blessings on your allies not completely terrible it's also a mini reminder to keep blessings active on yourself I mean they only last five minutes so it's easy to forget and that is the Paladin in hardcore classic wow I think the Paladin lends themselves well to both solo and group situations and can fully explore their entire toolkit during leveling rather than just being seen as a Healer I can definitely see some people being put off by the auto attack heavy play style but if you want a class that's safe and pretty chill to play the Paladin has to be a strong contender and that is another full class series done after having covered each class I'm still really on the fence about what I want to start first I'm probably going to end up with the trusty warlock pick but every class is interesting in their own way I do hope the video helped you make a choice and I always do my best to get everything right but it's just so much information to cover hence the not so short Total video duration either way best of luck on your hardcore Journeys watch out for caves and be ready to delete characters and go again and as always thank you all so much for watching and are listening in and I'll see you all in the next one very soon foreign [Music] [Music]

Channel: WillE

Views: 647,253

Keywords: classic wow, hardcore wow, wow hardcore, wille, classic hardcore, hardcore clips, hardcore death, hardcore wow guide, paladin, warrior, warlock, mage, priest, rogue, druid, hunter, shaman, toc, icc, dragonflight, wow, warcraft, mmorpg, mmo, best mmo, free mmo 2023, best mmorpg, best free mmorpg, best mmo 2023, mmo 2023, eso, gw2, ff14, osrs, ashes of creation, riot mmo, role playing game, rpg, dungeons and dragons, tabletop, gaming, pc, console, ps5

Id: hrz7LgowxoE

Length: 167min 12sec (10032 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 04 2023