Thoughts on why DM got moved up?

[Tristany-pagle]

I didn’t say they would follow Vanilla’s release schedule…

Faithfully recreating the Vanilla experience is what I expect and keeping to a very carefully thought out plan, rather than peddle content for subscription purposes.

The post quoted partly below clearly shows the thought process in why Dire Maul would be in phase two… along with Kazzak and Azuregos… if there was some reason NOW is a good time fo Dire Maul… it should also stand to reason that Kazzak and Azergos would be “ripe” for consumption as well. But then we have that sticky, messy layering problem still right? So let’s peel off Dire Maul to get subs… but not deal with Layering just yet.

@Kaivax

Our focus is still primarily on player power-progression, but we’re also aiming to capture what it felt like to play in a realm community in original WoW. To do that, we’re planning to mirror the approach taken by original WoW, with patches paired together. We’ll launch Classic with content from original WoW through patch 1.2.x, then the second update will include content that was in original WoW 1.3 and 1.4, the third Classic update will have 1.5 and 1.6 content, and so on.

Our first phase primarily focuses on launching Classic with Onyxia and Molten Core, but we’ve decided to hold off on Dire Maul for a while. Maraudon is still in the first phase, because it was originally released on December 18, 2004, just two weeks after the first player hit level 60, but we recognize that Dire Maul is in a different category. Some of the loot that’s attainable from Dire Maul is so good that it would affect progression through those early raids. We’re also planning to hold off on releasing Kazzak and Azuregos at launch as well, for the same reasons.