World of Warcraft TBC Classic Phase 2 is finally here, and like with every new patch release, there’s going to be a big spike in players logging back in to the game to try out the new content. The thing is, phase 2 on paper doesn’t have a ton of content to offer, besides the new raids, the new reputations and some items to craft here and there, there isn’t much that Overlords of Outland has to offer you at first glance, however, phase 2 brings some major changes to the game that aren’t that obvious, and that may affect your decision on playing the game.

Indeed, despite it not bringing a lot of content, phase 2 has a lot of under the hood and not so obvious things that it fundamentally changes about WoW Classic TBC, things that some of you may have been hating, or loving, during phase 1. We want to briefly talk about that, because these things may potentially bring you back to the game if you took a break from it, or even get you into the game if you’ve never played it since its release a few months ago. So here’s 4 major changes between phase 1 and phase 2 in Classic TBC, let’s get into it. 

1. Raiding Difficulty 

So first off and probably most obviously, phase 2 brings a major shift in difficulty when it comes to raiding, not only by bringing harder raids, but also by making previous raids easier.

So obviously the star of the show in phase 2 is the new raids, Serpentshrine Cavern, and Tempest Keep, on paper already, this is one of the very few patches in Wow’s history where we get two raids at once, that being said, SSC and TK only have a handful of bosses each, 6 and 4 respectively, which is significantly lower than any raid we got so far, so that balances out.

But aside from the number of bosses, those two new raids bring a significant jump in difficulty compared to anything we’ve had in the past in Classic up until now. Blizzard put those raids on the public test realms for the last month and they cranked up the difficulty quite significantly on them, and that was clearly felt by the players. Don’t get us wrong tho, those are still Classic raids, with just a handful of mechanics to manage, this isn’t some mythic raids type of thing, but SSC and TK fall somewhere between normal and heroic in terms of difficulty, where Kara and Gruul felt more like LFR difficulty. Speaking of Kara and Gruul, with phase 2 going live, Blizzard also mentioned that tier 4 content would be getting nerfed, they didn’t mention specifically what is getting nerfed but we can make some educated guesses and assume that Nightbane’s overall raid damage will go down significantly, Magtheridon’s debuff when clicking a cube will go down from 2 minutes to probably just a minute or so, no longer requiring a perfect coordination of everyone in the raid, and Gruul will also do his jump mechanic less often. All these changes will make it so that anyone who was struggling with tier 4 will have a significantly easier time getting that done now.

And finally now that we’re getting SSC and TK, this means we’re getting some actual 25 man raiding content, because let’s face it up until now we didn’t really have any 25 man raiding nights, Gruul’s Lair is a two boss raid that takes about 20 minutes to clear, and Magtheridon is even worse, it takes about 10 given you don’t wipe of course. But now with SSC and TK entering the scene, the feeling of progressing through the raids with your 24 other guildies for a whole 2, 3 or 4 hours will finally be here and TBC raiding will finally feel like TBC raiding.

2. Daily Content

Phase 2 brings some other major changes that will potentially affect the way you play the game in a big way, so moving on let’s talk about daily content.

So, daily content has been a staple of World of Warcraft since actually Burning Crusade, and it actually all started with what we’re getting in phase 2, Sha’tari Skyguard and Ogri’la. Up until now, besides doing your cooking and fishing dailies, there wasn’t much incentive for you to login every day to the game, so most people just defaulted to raid logging, literally. But with the introduction of these two new reps this may be about to change, and the reason is simple: WoW TBC Gold.

There’s around 70 WoW TBC gold to get from the dailies themselves everyday with Sha’tari Skyguard and Ogri’la, and then add to that any items you may obtain along the way, and add the cooking and fishing dailies on top of that, then when phase 5 releases add the Isle of Quel’danas dailies to the list, and you start to see where the motivation to do daily content everyday comes from. 

But besides gold, Sha’tari Skyguard and Ogri’la themselves have some rewards to offer, the most obvious one being the mounts of course, a lot of you may be stuck with griffons or wyverns and not having enough money to buy a cenarion hyppogryph or engineering chopper, so this is the first cheap unique flying mount model added to the game and it looks gorgeous.

Daily content is being added to the game in a big way starting with this patch, and it is what a lot of players have been enjoying in WoW since the dawn of time, a lot of you may not have had the chance to afford your epic flying mount yet and this is an incentive by it’s own to come back

and get that out of the way, that’s our second major difference coming to Classic TBC with phase 2.

3. Economic Changes

To stay on the topic of gold, phase 2 is bringing some major economic changes to the game, some that you may be able to take advantage of in a big way. We already talked about dailies so that’s one big economic change on it’s own, but besides that phase 2 introduces a ton of new ways to make gold to the game which may help you finally afford your fast flying mount or struggle less with consumables or anything really.

And the first one is the swift flight form for druids, why this is big for making gold you may ask well simply because druids have the option to instantly fly away with this and more importantly, gather herbs while flying, they still have to shape shift to their normal form to gather mining nodes but it’s barely an inconvenience since they can instantly fly off again. What this means is one, druids are about to become absolute money making machines and also herb prices will probably drop gives enough time, making it easier for everyone to afford their potions and flasks.

Speaking of flasks, those are about to get way, WAY, cheaper, because of one small item that went under the radar, Mark of the Illidari. This drops from both SSC and TK, it’s tradable and sellable on the auction house and it allows anyone with it to buy a flask of their choice from a vendor in Shattrath, give it enough time and these will drop to ridiculously low amounts of gold on the auction house and your raiding bill will shrink as a side effect. Now keep in mind the flasks you buy with these only work in tier 5 raids and beyond, but this will definitely also affect the prices for the normal flasks too so you’ll also be able to afford these for cheap for tier 4 content.

One more thing that will affect the economy coming with phase 2 is the new arrows and bullets made with engineering, those will be selling like absolute candy left and right because there’s tons of hunters and none of them have engineering, so if you have engineering you can very easily get the recipe for these from either the vendor in Shattrath for the bullets or by killing some mobs in Netherstorm for the arrows, and rake in a ton of TBC gold, especially early on.

And finally obviously with phase 2 comes a ton of gear recipes, a lot of them are best in slot and a lot of them will be highly sought after all throughout the expansion. But WoW Classic TBC phase 2 is going to boost the Classic TBC economy in a big way and everyone, no matter what their class or spec is can take advantage of it and finally be able to afford what they want, so that’s our third major difference between phase 1 and 2. 

4. PVP Changes

But for now let’s move on to the last one and that is some major PvP changes coming in with phase 2. So PvP is hit and miss for a lot of people and it’s always been like that in WoW, but with Classic and Classic TBC’s phase 1 in particular it always felt more miss than hit really, but it’s all about to change and even if you’ve never been really into PvP, this might motivate you to give it a try.

So first off and probably most importantly, Blizzard announced that same faction battlegrounds are here, and they’re staying until the end of the expansion AT LEAST, period. A lot of players have been unhappy with Blizzard decision to go the lazy way about the faction imbalance problem affecting queue times for BGs and just allowing players of the same faction to just fight each other, but Blizzard isn’t having it and they’re just implementing this anyways. 

Fair enough, despite the obvious fact that you’ll now be fighting players of your own faction in BGs most likely, this also means that now queues are gonna be significantly shorter for horde and mostly unaffected for alliance. This has been a major issue since Classic really, horde always had upwards of hours of queues and this should motivate everyone to queue back into BGs and enjoy PvP again.

Also, another incentive for doing PvP coming with phase 2 is the fact that there’s some big PvP items added with this phase, we are not just talking about arena gear, there’s PvP off pieces that you can buy with honor which are the best BiS for some specs IN PVE, some of you will have to do BGs if you want to compete in PvE, thankfully with the first change we talked about this should be significantly easier now.

Also coming with phase 2 is the PvP faction gear, this is some starter PvP gear that will boost your performance in arena and battlegrounds significantly if you don’t have any resilience pieces laying around, and this should incentivize a lot of you to get into PvP.

And obviously phase 2 also introduces season 2, with it’s whole set of PvP rewards that are going to be super strong even in PvE for a lot of you, that being said, the rating requirements for a lot of those pieces are still quite high for most players but now that Blizzard added the Arena Bulletin Board to Shattrath, you can clearly see how hard you need to push to get your rating higher and be able to afford those pieces. 

But that’s the last major difference coming with phase 2, as we said earlier, phase 2 doesn’t have a lot of content on paper, and unfortunately a lot of players will login, find out that there isn’t much to do and log out, but under the hood this patch has a ton of great stuff that makes the game better for pretty much everyone.