Wrath of the Lich King Classic Will Include Heroic Plus Dungeons From World of Warcraft

While the appeal of World of Warcraft Classic has always been the opportunity to experience a faithful recreation of an old era, it has also been an opportunity for Blizzard’s developers to do a few things better with the benefit of hindsight – and the introduction of Heroic Plus is exactly that for Wrath of the Lich King. In the present age of World of Warcraft, players have become used to Mythic Plus dungeons as a genuine and respectable alternative to raiding in the game’s endgame.

The complexity of the Heroic dungeons in Wrath of the Lich King was undoubtedly the determining reason in Blizzard’s choice to add much harsher Heroics in Cataclysm. With the release of Ulduar approached, the devs devised a method to add a new difficulty in the dungeons of Northrend while also thematically linking the concept to the new raid.

Wowhead has datamined a pair of Heroic Plus achievements inside the latest patch notes for Wrath of the Lich King Classic. They’re called Defense Protocol Alpha, and they cover all 12 dungeons from the expansion pack’s release. The four dungeons released with Patch 3.2 and Patch 3.3 are missing, but there’s no reason why players won’t see Heroic Plus versions of the Pit of Saron or the Halls of Reflection in the future.

World of Warcraft players may activate Heroic Plus mode for their Heroic dungeons in Wrath of the Lich King Classic by interacting with a Ritual Object discovered at the dungeon’s entrance, much to inserting a Mythic keystone. If all five players channel it at the same time, the damage and hit points of the creatures in the instance will be considerably increased, as well as additional boss dynamics introduced.

Heroic Plus, unlike Mythic keystones, will not have a depletion timeframe and will instead act as a standard dungeon challenge for World of Warcraft players to complete. The treasure from this new dungeon difficulty will be similar to Naxxramas gear from its 10-player mode, thereby allowing players a new method to bridge the gear score gap and prepare for raiding in Ulduar’s gigantic metropolis.

Though some may claim that including Heroic Plus into the game would diminish its realism, there is a greater case to be made in its favour. World of Warcraft Classic has always been at its finest when it walked the tight line between properly recreating the experience of playing an ancient expansion while not being slavishly tied to its shortcomings.