WoW Classic is an upcoming version of vanilla World of Warcraft that will take players all the way back to the 2006 version of the game. Veteran players are itching to get in and Blizzard has been stoking the fires of anticipation over the last few weeks with a number of forum posts detailing different aspects of the game. The latest is an interesting look into how the team is handling itemization.

From a systems perspective, WoW Classic will run off of patch 1.12. However, the in-game content will start from the beginning and release at a similar rate to the original game. The team has already laid out their content plans for both PVE and PVP content, but this most recent post deals with just the items (armor, weapons, etc.) available in the game.

Original WoW players will remember how quickly the game changed to keep up with the millions of people playing the game. With the benefit of hindsight, the devs know what is coming and can set each item's stats with that endpoint in mind.

So, instead of seeing small itemization changes happening as new content drops, the team will set everything to the final patch 1.12 state. This does take away a bit of the experience of discovery so prevalent in the original World of Warcraft; that said, it removes the unexpected roadblocks guilds faced back in the mid-2000s.

It's an interesting move to make, but one that makes sense. Blizzard says in the blog post that they could never fully recreate an experience from 2005 because we can't unlearn something we discovered back then. Instead, the team is focusing on making the experience as polished and fun as possible.

WoW Classic will be coming to PC sometime in Summer 2019.