I have an old 2013 Mac that I’d like to run WoW for a bit on. I have room for a small partition where I can install Mojave, or even Catalina if needed (though I would prefer Mojave).
I know it’ll be rough and slow, but I’m just wanting this year’s Winter Veil presents at the moment. I plan to try on the 26th or 27th when there’s no huge Ironforge crowd.
BUT I heard at Dragonflight launch something about certain Macs being unable to even launch WoW. I think it was Intel Macs in general? Which is what I have.
Hey I use a “27 mac desktop (all in one) I’m no expert but maybe buy some ram that will be usable with your current computer and also with a future new computer you will get? That would be smart
I’m currently playing on a late 2012 Mini (2.5 i5 w/16GB) under Catalina. It isn’t optimal, but I can play. WoW does warn me that my OS isn’t supported, but it will still let me load. I imagine at some point I’ll have to run under Win10 through Bootcamp, since updating the computer isn’t in the budget.
If by the “base game” you mean the retail (non-Classic) version of WoW minus Dragonflight, you’re using the same client that Dragonflight’s zones use already. You already have all of Dragonflight’s data on your drive, you just can’t access it yet because you don’t have a DF license for WoW. Performance in DF zones will be no worse than what you see in Ardenweald, which is the most taxing zone in the game on macOS.
Yes I mean retail. But I’ve never done Shadowlands content.
I heard DF was especially hard on Hard Drives, especially Dragon Flying.
What I’m concerned about is wearing out my hardware, because I want to keep this computer for as long as possible. The performance can look fine but if its really taxing on the hardware I’ll probably wait.
I heard a SSD is needed for Dragonflight content. A hard drive would wear out quickly, correct?
The reason an SSD is now essentially required (especially in macOS) is due to the combination of not one but two inefficient filesystems. One is APFS, which Apple now uses by default. You can mitigate this half by having an external SSD formatted as HFS Extended (Journaled). The other is CASC, Blizzard’s choice of encapsulation formats for the game’s files. They both suffer performance degredation over time for very similar reasons. SSDs and NVMe drives mitigate most of this, but sadly not all of it, on either platform.
As Omegal stated, it isn’t about wear. Your OS would wear out the regular HD just as much as WoW would, which is to say, not much. The problem is speed. Literally, that’s the problem. Regular HDs and even Fusion HDs are too slow for the combination of APFS and CASC. They’re too slow even for just CASC.
SSDs and their more powerful NVMe versions have tens of thousands of input/output (I/O) per second vs. maybe a couple hundred I/O per second (also called IOPS) for spinning platter HDs of any kind. That combined with near instant seek time for solid state drives makes them a must when trying to counteract CASC and/or APFS inefficiencies.
If your 2013 iMac is the one with the nVidia GT 750M you’ll be able to continue playing WoW at least for this expansion. That computer’s Thunderbolt ports may be Thunderbolt 1, but even at the “measly” speed of 10 Gbps, that’s easily 1 GB (gigabyte) per second potential throughput from an external Thunderbolt SSD.
Here is an example of a Thunderbolt SSD. While Thunderbolt 3 devices like this are supposed to be backward compatible, I suggest contacting OWC and asking if it will work with your system just to make sure since it is bus powered and Thunderbolt 1 tops out at 9.7W power delivery.