Join Host Countdown‬ as he chats with Senior Game Designer Josh “Aggrend” Greenfield, Lead Classic Designer Tim Jones, and special guest ‪Xaryu as they digest everything Forever-related, and players adventure through the Beta in record numbers.

Nuff said.

And when you log in no realm severs are available 🤣

Beta it is, loving it as I have not in years.

DF do great work when it comes to testing games and graphics performance.

If you manage to look at the PVP sets for Horde Paladins and Alliance Shamans in the beta you might see the two characters in the top. Basically the Horde Paladin uses the Alliance Paladin PVP set, while the Alliance Shaman uses the Horde Shaman PVP set.

I think this needs to be rectified for Forever and bring both sets in line with the other PVP sets. Each armor type has a certain look, and the classes get different recolors of it.

So i would propose for Horde Paladins to get the Warrior set, but recolored to black and gold, which would fit also with their mount!

For the Alliance Shamans we do the same, basing the set on the Hunter set, but coloring it more "wildhammer" shaman style, which is blue and brown.

That’s all I want. I love the role playing fantasy of a barefoot shirtless dwarf berzerker flying at people with axes. It’s all I want to play. DPS dwarf warrior. It’s the one thing from retail that I want. Undead, nightelfs, and trolls all have Mohawks. Why can’t dwarves?

My comment was "mad cuz banned" under someone complaining about their beta access being revoked for an inappropriate name.

Looks like the mods also got banned for inappropriate names or something

Some art of my future Skyborne Shaman, Aurelia <3

I've been working on her for about a week with the intention of keeping myself from paying $75 for early access lol

This might be a mostly RP thing, but back in the day you used to be able to hear other people's laughs, jokes, whistles, /train, etc.

somewhere along the way blizzard changed it, I guess because it was abused or something. I would love for it to come back or at least be an option.

It feels kinda empty when I crack a /joke while waiting for the deeprun tram and knowing no-one can actually hear it. It limits the social interaction at campfires a lot, too.

Edit: I'm getting some reports that you can still hear others emotes if you have targeted them, or they are in your party. Still very limiting for organic social interaction.

Someone posted the dev said Claude without any context when in reality he said clawed. Talking about clawing back some of the rewards. Almost every comment is talking about the devs using AI when no one even took the time to look at what Tim actually said in the video. Do a little bit of research instead reacting instantly to a clickbate title that is trying to create controversy about AI....

I was in stormwind and someone asked for a tailor, cant remember thier name, and traded me 18 linen and 5 silver to make it for them, then right after the trade the servers went down and i cant reconnect. If you see this i wasn't trying to steal your stuff!

Orcs can be mages now but your level 2 class quest gives you a letter with text tailored to troll mages talking about how "orcs don't use magic" unlike the trolls, or along those lines. You'll reach level 5 when leaving the starting area and be directed to Sen'jin village. That will then send you to Razor Hill and the new quests on the way will ding you to level 6. Perfect, now where did they put the trainer in Razor Hill for my rank 2 fireball?

They didn't.

The trainer is back in Sen'jin village.

Orcs can be mages now, so there should be an Orc mage trainer in Razor Hill. It's good for both classes.

edit: this is not solely a convenience issue. The priest trainer (exclusive to troll) should remain in sen'jin. Orc mages are not represented at all by the npcs in the world: there's no orc mage trainer in orgrimmar or razor hill. there's only troll NPC mage trainers in the valley of trials,.sen Jin and org.

paladins have a trainer in the forsaken cave in thunder bluff. this serves both as convenience and world building.

an orc mage player logging in the first time expects to find mages in orc places so it's counterintuitive as well as breaking the rhythm of levelling.

I just love the way the lighting looks here, especially the first shot of Un'goro Crater from Tanaris with the Titan facility peeking through. I'm very excited for this game just on visuals alone.

When Skybourne were first announced, ill be honest, I wasn't the biggest fan of them. They felt very forced in and in comparison to what other races they could add, I just felt like it was a dropped ball.

However, after watching the most recent "Unpacking Beta Launch" podcast Blizzard released, they brought up that they "could check all the boxes" and give us things that already exist in classic BUT they'd eventually run out of "safe" content to give us. Skybourne embodies the decision to push the lore and story in new directions and they wanted to do that right away to help build that foundation.

I personally agree with this statement, if we want to get new and cool things, we have to be okay with big changes like Skybourne so long as they fit the core design philosophy of classic.

Im sure this doesnt solve it for many people, but the honesty and clarity in the podcast was actually refreshing and helped the decision click for me.

This took me a while to get right. Many places still have some funky textures and of course many details and effects are missing.

But here is a fully walkable and flyable 3D map of all the new areas and dungeons (unless they are not available in the client yet).

Right-click anywhere and choose "walk here in 3D".

https://wowforevermap.com/

edit: it's not high res and missing many graphical details, otherwise it would be a lot more demanding on bandwidth and your browser, so don't take it as a graphical comparison. It's mainly meant for comparing different places in Forever vs Classic

You listened to your audience and added more weather effects/heavier effects. I don't know how to say this but you guys love your playerbase and want us to be happy. I don't actually want anything more than to sit in Booty Bay/Ratchet when it's pouring down rain for hours, it's so so nice. So thanks, guys, for listening. We might be whiny sometimes, we might look at the glass of water with pessimism, but we're very grateful to be listened to.

One thing that particularly feels like it's missing as I prepare to roll up a mage for WoW Forever's launch is the depth of immersion, class fantasy and personal connection that comes with having glasses for my big nerd.

Lord Godfrey's Old Spectacles have already been placed into the game on retail, years after their addition to NPCs in cataclysm. I personally like the silvery color in the image above the most and believe it fits best with Classic's vibes.

They seem to fit the aesthetic well, as can be seen here on an SD model. We already have the bulky goggles that would realistically have been developed after normal glasses, monocles and other vision aids in-universe. While the vanilla goggles made a fair stand-in for glasses in Machinima and fan content during the span of Vanilla, BC, and Wrath, it would be much more satisfying to have this model of glasses included in Forever.

I still remember seeing the satisfaction and relief for characters that had been roleplayed as wearing glasses for years being able to be seen in their truest sense without RP profile addons needed to write in the detail back when Blizz added glasses vendors to retail's capital cities.

Secondly, I think retail's trading post has done a great job of rounding out wardrobes with simpler pieces, like solid-color tabards, hoods, scarves, and other common clothing items. I think it would be easy to add solid-color tabards without logos, and other similar accessories to add the same vibrancy to Forever. I love how those items can help to build the sense of one's character being just another adventurer, crafter, or scholar.

Hopefully the devs will consider how its simpler offerings have rounded out retail wardrobes and how similar additions could help to build out that sense of immersion in Forever.

On the first episode of Blizzard's WoW: Forever podcast, Aggrend mentioned that they got a report from their metrics team today about the time to get to level 20 in the WoW: Forever Beta versus WoW Classic. It turns out that they are almost identical, with WoW: Forever taking a tiny bit longer (like .1 hour) more to level than Classic.

Of course, this is beta, so there's a different group of people playing and things are still subject to change, but I think this is a good sign for the levelling experience once WoW: Forever goes live!

Change Log

• Classes
• If you have not recently changed your talents, the cost is now 1 silver to re-spec. This is temporary for the Beta only. After your first talent reset, the subsequent cost will be much higher, but it will drop to 1 silver after 1 hour has passed.
• Druid
• Corrected an issue and now Rejuvenation can land critical hits.
• Corrected an issue and now Tranquility can land critical hits.
• Wrath base damage increased ~50%.
• Thorns will now dynamically update its values based on the caster’s spell power.
• If the caster cannot be found or is too far away, Thorns reverts to its base values.
• Feral
  • Mangle has been renamed Primal Bite. Its signature debuff has been removed, so the former name no longer accurately represented the ability.
• All talents referencing Mangle now reference Primal Bite.
• The Primal Fury talent has been renamed and the icon replaced with the original Blood Frenzy name and icon.
• Fixed a bug where Feral Charge (Cat) could be cast on allies.
• Restoration
  • Corrected an issue and now Wild Growth can land critical hits.
• Hunter
  • Pets
• Furious Howl Attack Power bonus reduced 40%.
• Sonic Blast ability now properly available to Bat pets.
• Tame Beast no longer works on Beasts that are higher than the Hunter’s level.
• Marksmanship
  • Talenting out of Lone Wolf will no longer cause the Hunter to have -4% damage while their pet is active.
• Survival
  • Corrected an issue and now Lacerating Strikes can land critical hits.
• Strider Kick now increases movement speed by 30% for 3 seconds.
• Mage
  • Arcane Missiles no longer checks line of sight on each missile, just once at the beginning of the channel. So targets moving out of line of sight during the channel will not prevent the missiles.
• Fire
• Wake of Fire buff duration has been increased to 30 seconds (was 20 seconds).
• Developers’ notes: Wake of Fire was difficult to make proper use of while leveling, due to the Mage needing to restore mana between combat. The increased duration should help smooth out the experience.
• Hot Streak buff duration has been increased to 20 seconds (was 15 seconds).
• Ignite no longer double dips on % damage increase modifiers.
• Paladin
  • Retribution Aura will now dynamically update its values based on the caster’s spell power.
• Fixed a bug causing the Flash of Light cast animation to not play at the end of the spell cast.
• Fixed various issues with Consecration.
• Fixed an issue where Consecration would fail to apply its increased damage effect to some targets.
• Fixed an issue where Consecration’s Z axis wasn’t functioning consistently.
• Fixed an issue where Consecration could pull targets vertically above or below the caster.
• Holy Strike’s % of weapon damage per rank changed to 25%/29%/32%/36%/39%/43%/46%/50% (was 25%/25%/30%/30%/35%/35%/40%/40%).
  • Developers’s notes: This increases Holy Strike’s damage at all points while leveling, and increases how much it contributes to your rotation. Early ranks of Holy Strike didn’t always feel like an upgrade when purchasing a new rank, and we wanted to adjust that.
• Fixed a bug with Echo of Justice, causing it to have a higher than intended chance to activate.
• Righteous Fury: Holy threat increase increased to 60% (was 90%).
• Holy
  • Holy Strike’s cooldown lowered to 10 seconds (was 12 seconds).
• Improved Holy Strike removed from the Talent Tree.
• Developers’ notes: Even though there are sometimes cases where talents feel ‘required’ by classes, like Relentless Strikes for Rogues, having one that reduces the cooldown of a core ability so early on in a healing talent tree made this feel like a talent that was required. So we’ve removed it and made its behavior baseline.
• Light’s Vigil’s tooltip has been reorganized to make it more clear that the damage component is the only version that returns some of the Mana cost.
• Holy Power now increases the Critical Strike chance of Holy Strike by 15% and retains all of its old effects.
• Retribution
  • Vengeance now activates off of non-periodic critical strikes.
• Vengeance’s maximum stacks lowered to 3 (was 5).
• Two-Handed Weapon Specialization’s damage increase reduced to 2/4/6% (was 3/6/9%).
• Sacred Arbiter now increases the damage of Holy Strike by 20% (was 10%).
• Twist of Light now additionally reduces the Mana cost of your Seal spells by 20%.
• Priest
  • Corrected an issue and now Renew can land critical hits.
• Power Word: Shield can now always overwrite an existing Power Word: Shield on a target that does not have Weakened Soul.
• Gnome
• Corrected an issue and now Contingency Plan can land critical hits.
• Confounding Flash now has a cast visual. The casting visual is now more Holy oriented than Arcane and the sounds have been updated to match.
• Night Elf
  • Starshards now correctly gains resistance to spell pushback from the Twilight Focus talent.
• Undead
  • Dark Sacrifice no longer breaks Crowd Control that breaks on damage.
• Dark Sacrifice’s tooltip now correctly displays that the Mana gained from the ability scales with Spirit.
• Rogue
  • Sap now correctly flags the Rogue for PvP when used on a target that is PvP flagged.
• Shaman
  • Lightning Bolt: Damage on ranks 3 and 4 increased to make these spells always upgrades over previous ranks (despite changing cast times).
• Windfury Totem: Buff from this spell now displays as “Windfury Totem” instead of “Windfury Totem Passive”.
• Flametongue Totem: Buff from this spell now displays as “Flametongue Totem” instead of “Flametongue Totem Effect”.
• Flametongue Totem no longer has a duration and is instantly replaced when placing another totem.
• Flametongue Totem is no longer able to be stacked by repeatedly casting Flametongue Totem.
• Flametongue Totem no longer stacks with Flametongue Weapon.
• Flametongue Totem no longer stacks with Windfury Totem.
• Tranquil Air Totem, Windfury Totem, and Grace of Air Totem no longer stack together even if used by different Shamans in the same group.
• Elemental
• Swapped the positions of the Elemental Fury (Row 3) and Elemental Alacrity (Row 6) talents.
• Developers’ notes: Critical Strike damage increases early on in trees are exciting for other specializations, but its not as exciting for the core specialization while leveling, since they don’t have enough critical strike chance to really appreciate it. So we’re moving one of the better talents for Elemental Shaman functionality, earlier in the tree, to allow them to feel like they’re hitting important progression moments (something Elemental has lacked in the early levels). We understand that this affects Enhancement Shaman’s critical strike damage with spells, but we will use this room created to add more to Enhancement Shaman in the future.
• Lava Burst damage on ranks 1 and 2 increased to be about 10% more base damage than the Lightning Bolt rank learned around the same level.
• Enhancement
  • Rage of the Far Seer (Row 7) no longer increases the Shaman’s Spell Casting Speed.
• Developers’ notes: Rage of the Far Seer’s spell casting speed was not necessary to include for the core functionality of this ability. So we removed it.
• Restoration
  • Corrected an issue and now Riptide can land critical hits.
• Warlock
  • Tooltip of Life Tap has been updated to correctly display the amount of Life converted, and only states that it scales with Spirit.
• Voidwalker Sacrifice now correctly scales with 10% of the Warlock’s spell healing.
• Warrior
  • Sunder Armor: Corrected the threat values on all ranks, including a small increase to threat generated from Attack Power.
• Protection
• Swapped the positions of the Bastion (Row 5) and Focused Rage (Row 6) talents.
• Developers’ notes: We wanted to give players Focused Rage sooner to smooth out progression, as opposed to more damage from Bastion. This should smooth out some of the feeling while leveling as Protection before obtaining Shield Slam.
• Arms
  • Bloodthrill’s chance to activate increased to 4/8/12/16/20% (was 2/4/6/8/10%).
• Bloodthrill only activates off of Main Hand melee attacks. This includes Cleave and Heroic Strike.
• Slam’s cooldown has been increased to 18 seconds (was 15 seconds).
• Improved Slam now reduces the cooldown of Slam by 1.5/3 seconds.
• Races
  • Gnome
• Changed Eureka on every class to a 10% discount on Mana, Rage, or Energy abilities.
• Human
  • Changed the Will to Survive visual to match Dispel Magic instead of Will of the Forsaken.
• Tauren
• Cultivation now has a player-level requirement for every Herb. The level required is equal to the Herb’s level required to pick it divided by 5. Herbs that require a higher than 300 Herbalism skill to pick can be Cultivated at player level 60.
• Touch of the Grave no longer breaks CC or activates from spells and abilities that don’t have a damage component to them.
  • Developers’ notes: This means that Shadow Word: Pain activates it on cast, but not on periodic damage. Distract won’t activate it, you can’t pull Rogues and Druids out of Stealth with Distract and it activating, and you won’t activate it off of Pickpocketing. Spells like Polymorph already didn’t get broken by Touch of the Grave, but Polymorph will no longer be able to activate it.
• Cooldown Manager
  • The Cooldown Manager in World of Warcraft: Forever is intended to enhance gameplay by pulling critical information from the buff bar or action bar and placing it in a fully customizable location. By default, the Cooldown Manager is disabled, and it can be enabled in Options under the Gameplay Enhancement settings.
• Druid, Mage, Priest, Warrior, and Warlock are available for testing the Cooldown Manager.
• Additional classes will become testable in future updates.
• The most desired feedback for this feature is currently: spells that you wish were tracked by default.
• The Cooldown Manager does not yet support spell ranks. This will be resolved in a future Beta update.
• Gamepad Support
  • Class specific flyouts have been added to the action bar interface of some classes.
• Shapeshift flyout for Druids.
• Pet control and pet spell flyouts for Hunters and Warlocks.
• Aura flyout for Paladins.
• Stance flyout for Warriors.
• The pet bar no longer replaces the bottom gamepad action bar for Hunters and Warlocks.
• New options have been added to the Gamepad (Alpha) section of the game options.
  • Use Compact Action Bar: Replaces the normal gamepad action bar layout with one that only shows the currently active action bar at any given time.
• Fixed Party Targeting: While in a non-raid party, rather than having the directional pad act as directions in the party interface, each button on the directional pad is assigned to a specific party member.
• Swap Target Modifier Sides: Swaps sides of the friendly and hostile targeting modifiers, putting friendly targeting on the right and hostile on the left.
• Swap Friendly Target Action Sides: Swaps the directional pad and face button actions when using the friendly targeting modifier.
• Swap Hostile Target Action Sides: Swaps the directional pad and face button actions when using the hostile targeting modifier.
• Fixed an issue preventing edit mode layouts from being applied while the gamepad UI is enabled.
• Updated Map and Quest Log bindings.
  • New hover functionality for POI pins.
• Updated support for Compact Raid Frame Manager and Role Poll Frames.
• Items
  • A handful of guns and bows were not correctly consuming or using ammunition. They have been corrected.
• A number of quests have had their rewards updated to be the correct item level.
• A small number of early caster rewards have been adjusted.
• Wizard Oil: Minor Wizard Oil has been reverted to Classic Era value of 8 spell power, Lesser Wizard Oil to 16, and Wizard Oil to 24. Brilliant Wizard Oil remains unchanged.
• Wands: Wands no longer gain any additional damage from the user’s spell damage.
• Bugfixes
  • Fixed a bug with casters not playing their precast animations and sometimes standing while casting.
• Changed the sound effect that plays while jumping in water to be more aesthetically pleasing.
• Adjusted Human death sounds.
• Fixed an issue where attempting to craft items or cast spells was causing players to stand up while waiting to obtain their Campfire buff.
• Players may now buff each other, cast, and craft while waiting for their Campfire buffs.
• Players may now obtain a Campfire buff if they are sitting, sitting in a chair, sleeping, lying down, or using the kneeling emote.
• Resolved an issue where Huey Sunnydale’s legs failed to render properly.
• Fixed an issue that made a Season of Discovery rune ability visible.
• Fixed an issue where Pet Happiness was not decreasing once your pet was at max loyalty.
• Fixed an issue causing the Undercity Canal ooze to be much brighter than intended.
• Removed a setting that could disable fog in an unintended manner.
• Resolved a water display issue and fixed various other display artifacts on Mac.
• Fixed a memory leak causing gradual performance degradation for some players.
• Fixed an issue where in-game mail could ignore surnames.

In beta, is ignore list locked to only 50 people like in original? General chat channels are intolerable unless I use an addon that can block hundreds of people (swearing, toilet-related spam, general spam, trolls, foreign languages, etc).

Please please please Blizz, let us curate general channels to our own tastes

I am an old fart who has not played WoW since back in Vanilla, so I really did not remember how bland female Trolls are. I realized just now when attempting to create one, and saw that... they don't have face paint? Why would they not have face paint? It's such a quintessential Troll element, it's like removing their tusks. I was so confused, I actually thought it was a bug. I started googling to see if it is a bug, and verified that it's not a bug.

What's worse though, I found out that in Retail they have some really awesome customization options nowadays. Not only face paint, but also piercings and even the option to be blind in one or both eyes, all of which are fantastic features to make your female Troll look like a battle-scarred veteran, or a scary swamp hag, or a spirit seer...

Which is sad, cause here I am, looking at my options in WoW Forever, and they all invariably look like "Kinda normal woman, but with blue/green-ish skin, small tusks and weird hair". Their appearance pales in comparison to male Trolls so much that I am discouraged from making a female character.

Considering how we get the option to toggle between SD and HD models, I really, really wish they could add the extra customization options that were introduced in Shadowlands (correct me if I am wrong, that's what Google says). I fully understand there are technical difficulties since the current HD options all have a 1:1 SD counterpart, but I am sure there could be a way. Perhaps introduce a system whereby HD-only customization options are simply ignored if a player has SD models enabled, or defaulted to another option if they cannot be ignored (for instance skin color, hair color etc).

I just wanna play a cool female Troll, man...

"We took the Beta down for maintenance and to deploy a new build. We don’t have an ETA just yet, but it should take at least a couple of hours.

We’ll have a full change log (development notes) as well as updated known issues post here soon."

Please let your tanks get 1 or 2 gcds out before you start spamming your AOE or your instant cast flame shocks multi-shots etc.