Nearly 2 million WoW Classic hardcore characters have met their ultimate demise

A month later, nearly 2 million World of Warcraft Classic hardcore characters have met their maker in the permadeath spin-off of Blizzard’s old-school MMORPG.

As Blizzard announced, exactly 1,982,716 players have been killed since the game’s official hardcore servers launched. A large portion of that number, 401,980 to be exact, were Hunter players. Warriors, one of WoW Classic’s most demanding yet rewarding classes, have bitten the dust 332,970 times, while Mages, the masters of crowd control and area-of-effect attacks, have died 294,082 times. Death counts for Paladin and Shaman are relatively low, likely due to the fact that they only apply to the Alliance and Horde respectively, and are therefore played by a smaller number of players overall. Combined, the two faction-specific hybrid classes rank below the Warlock in terms of number of deaths.

The statistics can tell us a lot if we read between the lines. First of all, hunters, warriors and magicians are among the most played classes in the game, which is reflected in higher death rates. Hunter in particular is an interesting case study. Many WoW players assume that Hunter is the “easy mode” in a permadeath scenario because they can fake death to get out of sticky situations and also have a pet that can help them aggro hold and kill enemies. The only problem is that hunters only get their pet at level 10. If I had to guess, I’d bet that a significant portion of the 400,000+ hunter deaths occurred before level 10.

Statistics from the game’s first week showed that the average player level at death was right at level 10, with falls and PvP duels being among the top five causes of death. The most popular classes were Warriors, Hunters, and Mages, with each class having higher death counts, while the game’s three most popular races were Humans, Night Elves, and Undead.

Given that nearly 2 million characters have died on their way to max level, it seems like WoW Classic Hardcore has found an audience. Blizzard has made a few select changes for the game’s hardcore servers, such as: B. the PvP login and the addition of a duel to the death option, but overall WoW Classic left mostly the same as the 2019 re-release, aside from only having one life, of course.

Players have wasted no time recounting their (often hilarious) deaths on platforms like Reddit, where tales of high-stakes life-or-death duels for loot, embarrassing downfalls like AFKing too close to a cooking fire and slowly burning alive, etc There have even been cases where hunters pretended to be dead for so long that they actually died. While dying represents the end of that character’s hardcore journey, players have the option to transfer killed characters to a non-hardcore server, where they can be revived and fight the next day.