What is Hardcore Classic?
For many players, World of Warcraft is simply a way to cool down after a long day of work. Others seek the challenge and set themselves difficult Goals or restriction for making their play through harder. Classic Hardcore trumps them all by providing an extensive ruleset, restrictions, and even events.
Classic Hardcore is a community project, welcoming everyone who seeks a challenge or feels like normal World of Warcraft gets too ‘dry’. While everyone can participate, there are some rules if one wants to achieve glory and reach the Hall of Legends, the leaderboards. As there is no other viable way of checking for cheaters, video proof is mandatory. However, if you just seek a personal challenge and don’t care for the leaderboards, you can still play hardcore without recording, as long as you play by the rules and are honest.
10 Tips to survive longer in Classic HC
To prepare you for your journey into eternal glory, we have assembled a list of the 10 most important tips for surviving longer in Classic HC.
1. Save your Gold
As you are unable to use the auction house in hardcore, making money might be a real problem. Still, gold is needed to acquire needed skills, basic items and your mount. To make a little extra gold while grinding, we suggest you to farm humanoid mobs, as they have a higher gold drop and cloth. In addition, taking skinning and just vendoring the leather is very useful.
2. Overconfidence kills you; be afraid!
While dying in default WoW means respawning and trying again, dying in HC ends your run. While confidence in general is an important skill, overconfidence might end your run earlier than expected. Before entering dangerous situations, ask yourself if the risk is worth it, while keeping in mind that there are no second chances!
3. Choose a useful profession and race
It’s totally up to you what profession/race you choose, it is advised to focus on survival-heavy sets. For professions, this would be cooking, first aid or alchemy. You should start changing your perspective and consider those secondary professions, you wouldn’t pick on a normal character.
As for races, keep in mind that every race comes with a free skill. Good choices for beginners would be Dwarves (Stoneform) or Taurens (Warstomp).
4. Do not trust other players
The one thing you can’t control are other players. While focusing on not dying, people tend to get inattentive and lose sight of their surroundings. While this is an issue, there’s an even greater risk: griefers. Some players enjoy ruining your HC run by trying to lure you into situations you can’t control and then leave you there to die. Keep an eye out for those pesky players flagging for PvP and standing on top of NPCs.
5. Stay away from caves
While caves give you a high density of mobs, mining nodes and treasure chest, they tend to end HC runs prematurely. We advise you to stay away from caves unless it is necessary to enter them. If you have to, wait for a lot of players roaming around the cave as a potential backup.
6. Watch out for runaways
There are certain mobs, most likely called “young x” or “runner x”, who tend to run away as soon as their HP drops low. Especially humanoids are prone to running away at low health. This might lure you into dangerous situations you can’t control. We advise you to either prepare a final blow or CC them if possible.
7. Height doesn’t matter
Be careful when fighting mobs from higher or lower grounds, as they ignore height differences. For mobs, only horizontal distances matter. Keep this in mind before entering vertical spaces like towers. They might just be able to hit you from 2 levels below you.
8. Leashing is key
When being in the necessary situation of a tactical retreat, remember that mobs only chase you up to a certain distance away from their spawn point unless being hit. That means, if you have to run away, stop attacking your target and have your pet go passive, so it also stops attacking, then just run away.
9. Outplay death
At some point, the inevitable happens – you die. We understand that losing your character can bum you out massively and end your journey in Classic HC, which is why we advise you to have a raft of alternative characters. Play with, e.g., three different characters in rotation, so that when one dies, you’ve got another one ready to keep playing. While this isn’t technically outplaying death, it surely does help psychologically.
10. Most importantly: Have fun!
This one is the most obvious one – have fun! Hardcore is a community made challenge to tickle those, longing for a more difficult play through. Don’t take the challenge too seriously!
Now, if you want to dive in, hit the link below and check out the add-on for Classic HC. We wish you the best, good luck on your journey!
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