Wow Ascension Review
Overview
Wow Ascension is a World of Warcraft Private Server. <Insert Legal Disclaimer Here> Let’s review briefly. For more information do a google search for “Wow Private Server Legal”. As I recall, in about 2018, there was a big brouhaha about Blizzard taking some private server folks to court and shut them all down, but the private server folks went to Blizzard and had a meeting and they decided to call a truce. If the Private server companies [Groups or whatever you‘d like to call it.] did not “Charge Money” for playing, then Blizzard would “Look the other way”. And based on the obvious popular appeal, Blizzard dug around in their old backups and recreated the original Wow, which they released as Wow Classic in 2019. So Private Servers are effectively “Legal” although technically against the “Terms of Service”. But if you are playing Wow, and paying for it, then you are subject to any TOS, and if you are not playing the official Wow, then how are you subject to any TOS? I’ll leave that question for some lawyers. I’m sure that for legal reasons, Blizzard needs the TOS to forbid private servers, but has decided to “Look the Other Way” for community reasons. Now on with the show.
Wow Ascension has some interesting ideas, and if you played Wow for years as I did, it has a powerful nostalgia value. Wow Ascension is essentially Wow The Burning Crusade Classic, with a novel class system and about 5x XP leveling boost.
Quick Overview of “Classless”
The “Classless” system allows you to learn spells from any class to mix and match to make your own class. This is available from level 1. They are two tracks: Pick a pre-built combo of spells, or roll your own. Personally, I can see the appeal of using Pre-Built if you are already max level and understand the system. But a whole setup will not work if you are just starting out and don’t have enough Spell or Talent points to do the build. So I always have “Rolled My Own”. More on that later.
So let’s talk in detail about the features Good then the Not So Good.
The Good
Installing on PC is no problem. Launcher is full featured and you can easily tell the launcher where to put the game. Unlike my experience with many other launchers, this one is very professional. It just works.
The Client is reliable. After about two weeks of playing, no crashes or issues.
The Classless hero builder includes all class spells. You can choose from a library of builds or build your own as you go. You can combine spells from two or more classes as you level up. Want a mage with a hunter or shaman pet? No problem. Want to change as you go? No problem.
There is a wiki with an overview and lots of detailed data.
There is a complete “Database” of everything that you can search to find out more than you might want to know.
In addition to Hunter Pets, Wow Ascension has Shaman, Demon and apparently Undead pets [ have not tried these.] The Shaman pets are “elementals” which are tamed and stored in The Stable like Hunter pets. Learning the Shaman Tame spell gives you a Boulder Earth Elemental. You can only have one Tame spell, so learning Shaman tame removes Hunter Tame and all your Pets.
There are drops for Hunter and Elemental Pets [ presumably Demon and Dragon pets too]. The drops are a rare drop from killing that type of creature, and allows you, or your alts, or anyone else, to automatically tame these pets without finding them again. You can share the drop before you use it yourself. I have not looked on the Auction House to see if the drops are for sale.
Leveling is scaled at about 5X so leveling is quick. Gear drops and rewards are at your level and there are extra reward chests that give you gear that you likely need based on your primary stat.
Ground Mounts are given at about level 6 and when you earn about 3 gold you can speed up your riding with Apprentice Riding skill and later Journeyman Riding.
There are lots of players – about 38000 when I have checked. – So queuing for a dungeon is no problem. Waits are short even for DPS.
The Donation Shop is not full of Pay to Win items. Mostly Cosmetic items and quality of life items. They call them “Convenience” items.
You are given spells at about level 6 to resurrect in the nearest town or capital city. And can be much quicker than walking back to your corpse, except for the long walk back to where you were fighting.
There are lots of drops, many of which you don’t need, but want for the gold. You can set it up or automatic Junk sale and Auto repair. So speak to an NPC and ride back to the fight where you left off.
You are given, at about level 10, a couple of automatic spells to allow you to revive in the Nearest Town or Your Capital City when you die, so no reason to walk back to your corpse. But you do have to walk back to continue where you left off. Of course most other games like Guild Wars 2 have re-spawn at the waypoint of your choice and Elder Scrolls Online allows you to resurrect where you are to continue.
The “Classless” system is very nice. You can easily back out of a choice by “Unlearning” spells. You will soon have all the resource you need to do this from quest rewards.
The Transmog system of wow to allow you to change your look has been modified to “Cost Nothing”, be a menu item rather than a capital city visit, be available at level 1 and every item you put on is permanently available to use across your whole account.
Any class can use any armor type, so why not wear plate armor on your Mage – Shaman? Sounds good to me and I’ve done it. There are armor pieces with Plate and Intellect in the game. Up your armor stats for more defense while doing fire damage from afar with a pet that heals you.
The Not As Good Part
Wow Asc is currently based on “The Burning Crusade” which is the first “Expansion” from 2007. I never played classic Wow. I started playing Wow with Cataclysm in 2010, so I’m not sure how classic worked. But you better take Food and Drink with you. The mobs will gang up on you and you will die. It’s best to have a pet of some kind – Hunter or Shaman pets work – to help tank for you. More later on which kind of pet you want.
I stopped playing Retail Wow, when level scaling was introduced in patch 7.3.5 in 2018.
The level scaling patch to retail Wow made it impossible to be ahead of the mobs you were killing, and so the whole game became a grind. Wow Ascension fixes that by a bunch of world buffs that players enable for the entire world. They effectively put a level or 2 on your character as you fight mobs so it is not such a grind. This is a feature that is overly difficult to build. It would seem that Wow Asc could have just added two levels to the zone scaling to fix the problem.
Guild Wars 2 originally released with no zone scaling, then added it – with no level adjustment. But in a few months they found that they had to add a level or two to your character since you were likely to be mobbed by several foes at a time. Once they did not no one complains and the system works quite well.
In Wow Asc the mini-map is there, but it does not reliably show quests. The map is not much better you can “Show Map” on a quest to get some more or less accurate blue shaded areas. Basically, it can be hard to get around to find what you want. I found that I was frequently looking up “Youtube Classic” quest name, to find out how to complete the quest.
In Wow Asc, I’ve played in Teldrassil, Durotar, The Barrens, Azuremyst Isle, Darkshore, and Eversong Woods. And later in Outland. It’s all there, but navigating to your quest can be an issue compared with modern games like ESO and GW2 which have much better mini-maps and navigation. I found I was often looking up Youtube Classic versions of quests to find my way to the quest.
The Mystic whatever they call it to learn more “Talents” or spell upgrades is pretty much worthless. You get drops all the time to enable this system, but you either have to visit a special “Altar” to use some of them and others give you a 1-5% enhancement to some spell or other. These drops are random, not based on your spells so they are likely useless for your build. I suggest just selling them for gold. You might want to enable some key talents for your spells, but this Mystic System seems overly complicated and since you are dependent on random drops rather then buying the Mystics you need from a vendor. It’s not worth the mental investment, IMHO.
Many of the dungeons are available and doing 1 or 2 runs a day helps with gold and leveling. But the finder only has one option: Random. No way to pick from the list. The random dungeon selected does not seem random but purely based on your level. But the good news is that lots of folks are running dungeons so the wait is not long even for DPS. Five minutes or less in my experience.
And now for the big Betrayal. Flight. There is a wiki on Fandom for Wow Asc. I’m not clear whether this is fan produced or produced or edited by Wow Asc. But it says:
But when you reach level 60, and travel to Hellfire Peninsula and talk to a Riding Trainer, you find that flight requires level 70, not level 60, and that it costs 700G not 250G. WTF? They lied! Yep they lied.
Then as you quest on the ground in Hellfire at level 60 you find that the 5X XP boost is gone. OMG. Getting to 70 is really going to be a grind. However, I’m not sure if this is an oversight or by design, but even at level 60, you can move on to Terokkar Forest and you’ll find that level XP boost is back to 5X and you’ll reach level 70 with quests and a few dungeons in no time – well about a day actually.
But then as you reach level 70, you find the game is over. You can fly, but you have reached level cap. But “Wait there’s more!”. There is Prestige.
Prestige mode allows players who have reached max level to reset their character level to 1 and start leveling again. Doing so awards the player with various exclusive Prestige titles and the Prestigious Cache, which contains gold, Prestige tokens and some pieces of max level Epic dungeon gear!
Prestige mode is repeatable, meaning you can reset, level to max, obtain Prestige rewards and carry the definition of character progression to a whole new level.
Personally, I have no interest in doing it again on this character. I recall this Do-Over concept from years ago in games like Dekaron which is an MMO from 2004. I’ll probably learn tailoring and harvest Netherweave to make 16 slot bags to mail to my other Alts. I have found Netherweave Bags on the Wow Asc auction house for about 6 G, so there is that.
Summary
Wow Ascension is an interesting novel take on a Classic Private Server. The “classless” idea is very nice, the accelerated leveling allows you to get on with the Nostalgia and skip the boring parts.
After my two weeks or so with this game, I’d give it a Two Thumbs Up. Give it a try if you’d enjoy the Wow Nostalgia. Don’t do this if you’ve never played Wow. It’s not an authentic experience. I’d look for a more classic private server TBC or WOTLK. Personally Blizzard ruined Wow with Cataclysm. But that’s just my opinion.
After much research, here is where I found Water Elemental Pets.
If you are going to play Wow ASC, then I suggest building a “Class” using spells from two classes. One for Damage and one for a Pet. I suggest Shaman for the pet class and Mage is very nice for the damage class. Or Shaman has ranged damage so go with Warrior Shaman. Forget those Put in Place totems, get a water spirit pet that can heal you and your party as well as tank.
Enjoy your time in Wow, or Wow Asc. Whatever floats your boat.
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Windy Weather 