Almost twenty years later, Burning Crusade is still the expansion the rest of World of Warcraft gets measured against.
Blizzard confirmed the pre-patch date for Burning Crusade Classic's Anniversary Realms in November, and I went back to Outland ahead of the rush to find out whether the expansion everybody calls the series' best survives an honest replay or only a nostalgic one. I played it originally in 2007 on a rogue I've since deleted, raided most of it on a schedule, and remembered almost nothing of the leveling, and what I found is that it survives.
Karazhan is what I went back for, ten bosses with personality inside a haunted mansion instead of another cave or another fortress, with the Opera event still rotating between fights and Prince Malchezaar still throwing infernals around the rooftop like furniture. I raided it in 2007 out of obligation, because that was simply what Tuesday was, and raiding it now, older, with no gear pressure and nowhere in particular to be, I noticed the thing I'd missed completely the first time: it's paced like a haunted house ride, short walks, constant reveals, one gag after another. Blizzard has shipped bigger raids in the years since, and I don't think they've shipped a better-designed one.
“Blizzard has shipped bigger raids than Karazhan since. I don't think they've shipped a better-designed one.”
I've spent twenty years comparing every raid I've cleared to that one without ever quite realizing that's what I was doing, which only occurred to me somewhere around the third boss on this run.
Flying mounts are still the expansion's biggest structural idea, turning a world of corridors and elevators into a place you can approach from any angle at all, and Outland's broken floating geography was clearly built for them from day one. Questing on the ground in the vanilla zones afterwards feels like a downgrade, which is about the highest compliment a nineteen-year-old feature is ever going to get.
The attunements were good, and I'm aware that gets me yelled at in guild chat. The weeks-long chains of dungeons and keys you needed before setting foot in Karazhan or Serpentshrine Cavern get remembered as busywork, and Blizzard has spent every re-release since sanding them down further. The attunement is why walking into Kara meant anything at all, though, because my guild's roster for those runs was built entirely out of people I'd done the chain with, and the friction turned out to be the social glue holding all of it together.
Modern WoW removed that friction, and the guilds it used to produce went with it, which I don't think anybody decided on deliberately.
Class balance is the part nostalgia can't do anything about. Arcane mages and combat rogues were the expansion's chosen children, several other specs spent two years underperforming badly, and Classic's promise of playing it as it was includes every one of those blind spots left unpatched. Anybody who mained an enhancement shaman in 2007 gets to do that again, on purpose, in 2026.
Arena, which debuted in this expansion, holds up shockingly well for a 2007 system. A coordinated 3v3 working through cooldowns is still some of the tensest PvP this game has ever produced, and I played about forty matches this month with a friend who quit in Wrath and came back for exactly this and nothing else.
Leveling through Hellfire Peninsula and Zangarmarsh is more linear and more quest-guided than vanilla's sprawl was, a bit theme park by modern standards, and the zone variety carries it anyway, a mushroom swamp and a shattered crater and a jungle growing on the bones of a dead titan.
The Anniversary Realms question is whether a phased rollout of a solved game recreates 2007 or only simulates it, with a fresh economy, fresh server politics, and a meta that got fully documented two re-releases ago. I don't know the answer to that and I couldn't find anybody who does, because every previous Classic launch has behaved differently from the last one and Blizzard doesn't publish the numbers that would settle it.
My character slot is already reserved either way. It's a mage, which is not the class I said I'd roll, and I've definately been telling people I picked it for the flavor.