Season of Mastery 2 is something that has been pretty much confirmed considering Blizzard said when launching Season of Mastery that there would be multiple seasons. 

Season Of Mastery 2 Concept Examples

Considering Blizzard closed the Season of Mastery servers over a month ago, I would say Season of Mastery 2 is right around the corner and will probably be announced any day now, and beta testing or PTR testing should be underway shortly. 

Considering the name Season of Mastery, that “of Mastery” part kind of hints towards every season focusing on something different, and the next season will most likely have a different name than Season of Mastery, and here are a couple of examples: 

Season Of Hardcore

This would be an entire season focused on the current Hardcore Challenge on Classic Era, aka one-life servers. 

Season Of Victory

This is a season focused on PvP with improved PvP Systems, maybe even improved PvP Rewards that would get better with every content phase based on your rankings, and a PvP System that gives you gear & rank based on your skill rather than time spent doing battlegrounds. 

This season would also include Rated Battlegrounds & Arenas, keeping in that PVP Season Theme. 

Season Of Mastery 2 Wishlist

With that in mind, I want to take some time and talk about what I would personally want to see in Season of Mastery 2. 

Increased Raid Difficulty

*More difficult raids. Season of Mastery was great, and the new mechanics they put into raids were actually pretty cool. However, many of them were pretty easy to work around, and especially in Molten Core. They didn’t actually make that big of an impact, except for Baron Geddon, which took down a couple of pugs for sure. 

Personally, I really enjoy when raids provide an actual challenge rather than just being loot-pinatas, so the more difficult they can make the raids, the more fun I think it would be. 

More Loot From Raids

*With increased raid difficulty, I would also like to see an improved amount of loot dropping from each boss. The reward should be worth the effort, so if you’re making raids more difficult, there should also be more loot involved. 

This is also very much due to the fact that these seasonal servers are exactly that, they are seasonal, and Season of Mastery 1 lasted just around a year, a little longer, but let’s use 1 year as the benchmark here: If every season is supposed to last roughly a year, instead of Classic WoW’s, almost 2 year life-span, we obviously need to obtain loot quicker in order to get the items we want. 

Now, you could use the argument that if we obtain less gear, future raids will by default be more difficult because we have less gear, but I would much rather like to see increased raid difficulties plus increased loot drops, because if we need to feel weaker just to make the raids feel more difficult, that is usually not the correct way to go as people enjoy striving to obtain their best-in-slot items and being as prepared as possible. 

When you’re doing a raid, you obviously want the best items you can get in order to parse as high as possible, so having the opportunity to get the best raid items possible is a must. 

Rated Battlegrounds & Arenas

*This is something I personally want to see in the next Season regardless of whether or not the season is actually focused on PVP. 

The simple fact is: Rated Battlegrounds & Arenas would add a lot of content to these Seasonal Servers, making them more enjoyable overall, and it gives you a way for your team to measure your skill against other teams of equal skill-ratings. 

New PVP System PLs

*While we are on the topic of PvP: Remove the old PvP System. In seasonal servers, nobody has time to quit their jobs & divorce their wives & abandon their families just to grind Alterac Valley 16 hours a day for weeks on end. Also, remove or time-gate the acquisition of Grand Marshal or High Warlord items. 

Timegated PVP Rewards

*Speaking from experience on the first run of Season of Mastery, the people that were actually trying hard and wanted to clear the first few raids quickly, had to grind Alterac Valley and get that gear as soon as possible because you could start getting it right out of the gate, and that Rank 14 gear is stupidly overpowered to have during Molten Core Progression. 

Increased Leveling Speed

*This is something Season of Mastery did actually do quite well in my opinion: it gave you a pretty significant & noticeable increase in experience, while also making sure it still felt like Vanilla WoW. 

The way it worked in Season of Mastery was you got an additional 40% experience from quests, and even more from Dungeon Quests, and honestly this is exactly what I was looking for, as it enforces questing & doing each dungeon at least once with quests, which I personally think is fantastic. 

This way you see people out in the open world actually doing quests rather than just mindlessly grinding mobs or AOE farming or doing dungeon cleaves. However, even with this 40% buff to quests, in many cases, grinding mobs were still faster, especially if you were a Mage or a Paladin, and even in certain level brackets it was faster to do Dungeon Cleaving in order to level up. 

Personally, I would like to see the experience from quests increased even further, once again improving the amount of experience you get from quests and further emphasizing that people should be questing rather than dungeon farming or AOE farming. 

And this is not to force people to quest, it’s more-so the other way around, because with the current minimax mentality a lot of people have, we take the path of least resistance & whichever path will get us to our goal faster. 

So, if questing is fun but grinding is faster, a lot of people tend to go for grinding because again it is faster. This has in the past led to people feeling forced to grind mobs or dungeons when they actually would much rather just do quests, and this time around I would like to see the actual speed leveling meta change to where questing is number 1. By the way, if you want to quickly complete your quests, using WoW Classic Gold will help you a lot.

Here’s what I would like to see: +50% experience from quests, and add another +10% every week starting after 4 weeks of the Season. This gives everyone 4 weeks of “even grounds” when it comes to leveling, but it also gives newcomers a catch-up mechanic so people that want to join the season later on. Don’t have this massive barrier-to-entry. 

The simple fact is: Leveling is more fun when there’s other people to level with, and the later we get into the season, the fewer people will be leveling, so we need to give new players some incentive to actually join, otherwise these Seasonal Servers will always be going downhill in population. 

Related: WoW: What Blizzard Should Do To Make Season of Mastery 2 A Successful Launch?

Additional Information

*Now one more thing I want to talk about is class changes: I’m going to keep this very simple and to the point: I want to see class changes from either TBC or Wrath, put into this Season. 

The simple fact is, even in Season of Mastery where people were raiding without World Buffs, Warriors & rogues were topping those damage meters, and this led to an enforced meta for the endgame. 

Even if you maybe did not want to play a Warrior or a Rogue, if you wanted a melee DPS raid spot, you had to. Giving us some Class Changes that we are already familiar with in the Classic WoW Universe, AKA either the Burning Crusade or Wrath of the Lich King, I think would really help spice things up, and to top it all of: Give us the current Wrath of the Lich King Talent System & Talents, but scaled down to level 60 obviously. 

*One more thing worth talking about here: these Season of Mastery Servers could even run into the Burning Crusade, considering we don’t have any TBC Classic or TBC Era Servers at the moment, and there is a pretty solid player base that enjoys TBC, so it might be worth exploring the option of these Seasonal Servers actually progressing into TBC and becoming TBC Era Servers, eventually.