When I first heard about the World of Warcraft Classic Hardcore challenge a year or so back I thought it was the dumbest thing ever. What kind of person would put them through such a masochistic challenge? World of Warcraft Classic is extremely punishing, especially in the early levels, and seeing as it takes way more that 100 hours for the average player to reach 60 there's a lot of time that's lost when you die.

The thought of giving this challenge a go has grown more and more on me so now that they released official hardcore servers I decided to give it a go.

What is World of Warcraft Classic Hardcore?

World of Warcraft Classic Hardcore is a version of World of Warcraft Classic where death is permanent. Your character has one life. If you die you can't resurrect that character and you instead have to start over. This means you have to approach the game in a very different way than you normally would which is what makes this challenge appealing to me. You have to make every little action count if you want to survive. Everything from knowing your class well and making use of the different professions in the game. In standard Classic you can ignore a lot of this. In Hardcore you can't.

For the Horde

I've played a lot of World of Warcraft in my life but one thing I've almost never played is Horde. I played a little bit of Horde when I first started playing World of Warcraft in 2005. I don't think I reached much more than level 25 before switching to Alliance for literally the rest of my life. Because of that I decided to roll Horde this time around so that I get to experience the game from the other side for once.

I've also never played a Warlock so that's the class I decided to go for. I see different people ranking it as one of the best and worst classes to play in the hardcore challenge so it'll be fun to see how this goes. Luckily no classes are complicated to play in World of Warcraft Classic as it mostly comes down to pressing 2-3 buttons. Far from the 35 button rotations some classes have in retail World of Warcraft these days.

When I spawned into the Valley of Trials in Durotar I was hit with a wave of nostalgia. My first ever character in World of Warcraft was a Orc Warrior named Gevaudan and he also spawned into this place 18 years ago. I picked up all the nearby quests and got around to killing boars. It's not a proper World of Warcraft experience without exterminating some boars. I think literally every zone in World of Warcraft has at least one quest to kill boars.

Since I'm playing on Hardcore I have to be careful every step on the way. It's not like these level 1 and 2 mobs don't have the ability to kill me. I'm fighting one enemy at a time only and that's how it's going to be for this whole playthrough as much as I can help it. This is easier said than done especially when it comes to doing quests in caves where the mob density is pretty high. There is one cave quest in the Valley of Trials and I was able to group up to complete most of it.

After completing all the quests in the Valley of Trials I had made it to level 5. It was time to leave and make my way over to Sen'jin Village for more quests. This is where the game starts getting dangerous for real. I'm now out of the beginners area and most of the mobs I'll encounter from now on are aggressive, meaning they will attack me if I get to close to them. In a game like this death can easily come from fighting two enemies at once especially for a cloth wearing class like the Warlock. Luckily I have demon pets to help me out.

I completed all of the quests around Sen'jin Village with ease. I made my way over to Razor Hill and completed all the quests there as well with relative ease and reached level 10 in the process. So far so good and I haven't really been close to dying yet. Now I'm going to make my way over to Orgrimmar, the main city of the Orcs and the Horde, before I'll tackle my biggest challenge yet. Skull Rock. According the the Deathlog addon the 10th most dangerous enemy in this challenge resides here. Hopefully I'll make it through.

^{All images in this post are screenshots taken by me.}

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