Classic
Burning Crusade
Lich KingAscension WoW Season 9 has been announced right on the heels of Season of Discovery and it is their biggest season yet. Ascension is a private server where you create your own custom hero, and it’s gotten a lot of attention since people started comparing Season of Discovery to it at Blizzcon. Their new fresh realm releases tomorrow. It has features like 1500 new abilities and talents, tons of things to discover in the open world, an endless wildcard dungeons called the Manastorm and more.
To start, they said that this season goes back to being classless. What that looks like is that they’re removing all the restrictions from the game and taking all of the skills from their Mystic Enchantment system, which essentially gave you a bunch of cross-class archetypes to pick from, and breaking those up into a crazy 1500 new abilities and talents. That means instead of having to play an archetype (like Arcane Gunslinger), you can actually mix and match whatever abilities you want together and make a custom hero. This seems like a step towards what the game was originally about, which was letting you mix skills from different classes to make something unique. Only this season, there’s 1500+ new abilities and talents to discover.
All of this is packaged in their Wildcard game mode, which we’ve talked about before. Basically, everything is random so you don’t have to memorize all 1500 of those new abilities. You random abilities and talents every level, you unlearn what you don’t want with Scrolls of Fortune, and you get stronger. This is probably a good move, since having to go learn all those new skills would have been a nightmare. Now you can just kind of play and get better, making your own character good as you go. They also opened up how you get the reroll scrolls a lot, and you can now get them unlimited just by playing. Leveling, dungeons, raids, battlegrounds, mythic+, quests, prestige, hardcore one-life trials, and pretty much everything you do has a chance to give you reroll scrolls.
Season 9 also gives you a ton of stuff to do. The most exciting thing is probably the Manastorm, which is an “endless wildcard dungeon” PvE mode. You can play solo or as a group of up to 10 players, and you progress through a bunch of mini-dungeons and kill bosses. Each time you do, the next one is harder and the monsters are more random. The video shows dungeons merging together, so you might find murlocs in Zul’farrak or Dire Maul ogres in Scarlet Monastery or something. Since those new monsters do different things, and might be a lot stronger depending on how deep you are, it changes up the dungeon experience. It’s also really fast-paced, and there’s affixes if you go super deep.
Ascension’s been around since 2016, and it’s clear they’re moving forward. If you want to check out their Season 9 realm, it launches on December 15th. But you don’t have to start day 1 to be competitive. Since it’s Wildcard, you can get better just by playing and pretty much start any time. If you like the idea of theorycrafting builds or having a big adventure to sink your teeth into that’s more than just 100 new runes, check out Ascension.
