Blackwing Lair cleared in WoW Classic within just 40 minutes

Blackwing Lair being fully cleared within 40 minutes of it going live in WoW Classic was inevitable. I find it darkly amusing, because it happened with Molten Core, and it will happen with Ahn’Qiraj and Naxx, too. As Wowhead points out in their post, both Progress and Calamity went into Blackwing Lair at level 60, fully MC/Onyxia geared and ready, with a full array of consumables. And most importantly, they went in knowing every single raid strat for every single boss fight up front.

This is something I really feel needs to be emphasized. Every single WoW Classic raid encounter is already essentially on farm already. Back when this was new content, people didn’t know raid strats for it and had to figure it out as they went. My guild went into BWL barely knowing what Razorgore did, let alone the entire rest of the raid. We didn’t go in with the effective knowledge of fifteen years of gameplay and detailed, readily available raid strategies for every single boss in the raid. Our first kill of Vaelastrasz happened despite the healers mistaking the raid leader’s instructions and not allowing one of the tanks to die.

In essence, a great deal of what made raids take a while to clear back in the day was learning how to do the fights. Trial and error was paramount — no world first guilds streamed their fights back then and there were no alternate difficulty levels, so the best raids in the world were on the exact same content you were. It was often tuned towards providing them a challenge and you just had to kind of muddle through it as best you could, with what strategy trickled down via word of mouth. This means that Blackwing Lair on WoW Classic, and indeed all raid content, has essentially been pre-defeated. The players already know it.

The fact that it took a week for Molten Core to be cleared is likely attributable to the fact that people were going in undergeared and in some cases below level 60. That’s never going to happen again — fully min-maxed groups of max level characters with all the buffs and trimmings are going to be blowing these raids wide open as soon as they can. And with problems that plagued the original raids like latency, server wide crashes and other instability far less prevalent on WoW Classic, expect even Naxx to fall in a fraction of the time it originally took.

WoW Classic is, in some ways, already beaten. All the strats exist. All the fights have already been won. That’s just the nature of a game that intends to recreate something fifteen years old.