Difficulty
Azeroth has been reborn as a world of true danger. On Project Epoch, creatures hit harder, survive longer, and unleash empowered abilities, pushing players to rise to the challenge. Whether you're braving the open world, facing down Elite threats, or diving into dungeons, every encounter now demands skill, strategy, and sharp teamwork.
Difficulty
Azeroth has been reborn as a world of true danger. On Project Epoch, creatures hit harder, survive longer, and unleash empowered abilities, pushing players to rise to the challenge. Whether you're braving the open world, facing down Elite threats, or diving into dungeons, every encounter now demands skill, strategy, and sharp teamwork.
The World Needed More Bite
Let's be honest, Azeroth has always leaned a bit too easy. This became painfully clear with the release of WoW Classic and continues today on Classic Era servers. Creatures hit like wet noodles, have low armor, rarely cast abilities, and overall provide a less-than-intense challenge. We've spent countless hours rebalancing the world using modern data and fresh design approaches, reshaping Azeroth into a far more dangerous, immersive landscape.
Power Creep
Project Epoch introduced extra talent points and stronger early-game gear, unintentionally making the world even easier than intended. We quickly realized manual creature tweaks wouldn't cut it — we needed a scalable system that could increase difficulty across the board, while preserving the spirit of a blizzlike experience without crushing the fun.
The Epoch Adjustment
We developed a custom system to scale core creature attributes like Health, Armor, Melee Damage, and Spell Power. The first three were simple percentage buffs. But Spell Power? That took things further. We crafted custom versions of thousands of creature spells, buffed their potency, and reattached them to the creatures. The result: you'll face not just tougher creatures, but ones wielding noticeably stronger magic and abilities.
What's Been Boosted?
Our adjustments go far beyond simply increasing raw damage. We've enhanced a wide range of creature spell effects, including elemental school damage like Fire, Frost, and Shadow; health leech abilities; weapon strikes; and mana burns that sap your resources. Direct heals, periodic heals, and periodic damage effects have all been strengthened, alongside improvements to damage shields, absorbs, and buffs or debuffs affecting resistances, stats, attack power, and healing received. Altogether, over 3,000 creature abilities have been amplified, refreshing the world's difficulty and adding new layers of danger, strategy, and discovery.
Creature Upgrades
This isn't just a numbers game. Beyond buffing Blizzard's original stats and spells, we've gone deeper — hand-editing entire families of creatures to introduce brand-new mechanics and behaviors. Even at low levels, you'll encounter fresh challenges you've never seen before.
For example, wolves across Azeroth now have the ability to close the distance with a ruthless, lunging leap, while boars may wind up a long-casting, brutal charge attack that demands quick reactions to dodge. Expect familiar foes to fight in unfamiliar, deadly, ways keeping you on your toes no matter where you roam.
Elite Difficulty
Elites and Rare Elites no longer feel like mild speed bumps — they are now the dangerous, group-worthy foes they were always meant to be, requiring sharp solo skill or well-coordinated group play to bring down. Beyond just boosting their stats, we’ve gone further by adding multiple elite-only questing and farming areas throughout the world, offering high-risk, high-reward challenges for players eager to test their limits. And in dungeons, where elites already dominate, we’ve applied even more scaling to ensure that both trash packs and bosses push your party’s strategy, preparation, and execution to the limit.
Bosses Reinvented
It's not just the dungeon trash that's been upgraded, bosses have undergone drastic reworks as well. We haven't just adjusted their stats; we've woven new mechanics directly into their existing rotations or, in many cases, transformed them into entirely new encounters. Whether it's a familiar boss now sporting fresh, unexpected abilities or a fight that feels like a complete redesign, players will face dynamic, engaging challenges that demand teamwork, strategy, and adaptability to overcome.