WoW’s 21st Anniversary is Live Now

What do you mean November is already halfway over? I swear it was April last time I looked at a calendar. Well, since it is indeed November (apparently), that means World of Warcraft is celebrating its twenty-first birthday. That’s (somewhat ironically) a sobering thought for me, partly because that means I’ve been playing WoW for seventeen years now. Unfortunately, this celebration is rather disappointing. It appears that Blizzard basically just copy-pasted everything that was in WoW’s twentieth anniversary last year, and then actually cut content from that rather than adding to it. I’ll cover the differences as best I can.

I covered pretty much everything that was present in last year’s anniversary festivities in its own article. I’d rather not rehash all of that stuff here, so I’ll just very briefly run through some of the highlights. If you head to the Caverns of Time in Tanaris, you can join in on the fun. You can acquire Timewarped Badges by completing anniversary quests you’ll find all over the party area, many of which can be repeated. You can then spend Timewarped Badges on things like recolored, higher-resolution versions of Tier 2 class armor sets from way back in the day.

There are attractions like the Fashion Frenzy and Mount Mania events, where players can show off their best transmog outfits and their most elusive mounts. That’s in addition to the Chromie’s Codex scenario and the version of Blackrock Depths that’s been reworked into a raid for the duration of this anniversary event. I should mention that the anniversary festivities will be live until December 7th, 2025. All the world bosses that were present last year have returned, so you can join groups of your fellow players to take them down. All characters have a passive 10% experience and reputation buff during the event.

Just like last year, there’s a quest you can repeat daily that will give you an additional 10% buff to reputation and experience gain for 12 hours. This buff’s timer doesn’t continue counting down while you’re offline, so you won’t be pressured to keep refreshing its effects. Interestingly, the permanent version of the passive buff also benefits Timerunning characters in the ongoing Legion Remix event. However, Timerunning characters are supposed to mainly stay in Legion zones. As such, I don’t know whether or not they’re permitted to travel to the Caverns of Time and obtain the additional buff.

Two new attractions weren’t present last year: The Loyal Watchman transmog set and the Khaz Algar Enthusiast title, both of which can be purchased for Timewarped Badges. You’ll also likely notice that two vendors, Storekeeper Reginald and Bobadormu, are nowhere to be found at this year’s anniversary event. If you had your eye on any of their wares that you couldn’t snag last year, you won’t have a chance to do so this time around. I know Blizzard probably doesn’t see WoW’s 21st anniversary as much of a milestone, but it feels like they didn’t even try to make it special.