WoW Forever promises slower class patches and anti-RMT systems

The main lesson was restraint. Season of Discovery was a seasonal spin on WoW Classic that rewrote how progression worked, handed out new abilities, gave classes unusual roles and redesigned dungeons. Blizzard says the team pushed every class as far as it could go and tried out every fantasy a player might want.

The studio compared the result to wolfing down your entire Halloween haul on the night itself: a blast at the time, then a stomachache. In an interview, Blizzard said WoW Forever will be “careful and cautious” and that class changes will arrive more slowly.

That fits with another point Blizzard made in the same conversation: it does not plan to modernize Forever’s classes. The goal is to keep the feel of the original game rather than turn every class into something new each season.

The second lesson was about money. Real-money trading, or RMT, means buying gold or items with real cash, usually from outside sellers who farm the game with bots. It drives up prices for everyone else and has dogged both the modern game and Classic for years.

Blizzard says Season of Discovery taught it which controls it could build to manage the economy. The team added systems, some hidden and some that players can see, that govern how key resources flow into and out of the game. The studio credits those tools with a much healthier economy and far less RMT during the season.

For Forever, Blizzard says it has several new detection systems in place, but it won’t go into detail. It described fighting gold sellers as a cat-and-mouse game and said explaining too much would only help the other side. Its message to players was blunt: the team is watching closely, and buying gold isn’t worth putting your account on the line.

Here’s the twist. Even with that promise of caution, Forever has gone through sizable class changes in its final days before launch. The beta ended a little over a week before release, and a pre-launch patch spotted in the game files brought major changes to Hunter, Paladin, Mage and Druid.

Mage and Druid took the hardest hits:

• Druid: the Feral talent tree now splits Cat Form and Bear Form further apart, and Berserk is gone, which especially hurts Bear tank builds. Primal Bite and Shifting Power replace it at the bottom of the tree.
• Mage: Frost Blast was removed, Ice Lance hits harder but now has an 8-second cooldown, and Critical Mass drops from 10% to 6% crit chance. Arcane loses its early hit talent, with that bonus moved into the Frost tree.
• Warrior and Paladin: both got friendlier tweaks, with Warriors no longer starved of Rage in the mid and late game.

Racial abilities moved too. Tauren’s Endurance now only adds 5% health, losing its extra bonus. Some players were upset that there was no chance to test the Mage and Druid changes before launch. Pre-launch tuning isn’t quite the same as the ongoing churn Blizzard says it wants to avoid, but it shows that “slower” doesn’t mean “frozen”.

If you liked the original 2004 game, WoW Forever is built with you in mind. Blizzard describes it as a social game first, and its design leans that way:

• No flying mounts, so getting around takes real planning and you see more of the world.
• No separate servers within each rule set, so everyone on PvP, PvE or roleplay rules shares one big world.
• Over 1,000 new quests, plus new zones including Riverglades, Mount Hyjal and Zephras Isle.
• Slower leveling: one hands-on player reached about level 15 in 10 hours.
• A Legacy System that rewards making extra characters with points that make them stronger earlier.

There are new options too, like Undead Paladins for the first time and a new Skyborne race. The same WoW subscription covers Forever, Classic and the modern game, so you can try it without paying extra.

For your character, Blizzard’s promise means fewer sudden swings in how your class plays after launch. For your wallet, the anti-RMT work should help keep auction house prices sane, though no system has ever stamped out gold sellers completely.

Not for now. In a final pre-launch discussion, Blizzard said PvE, PvP and roleplay rule sets will stay apart, including their auction houses. Some on the team wanted to let PvE and PvP players group for dungeons, but the worry that farming is much easier on PvE servers settled the debate. The economy concern from Season of Discovery is still shaping big decisions.

Blizzard also said layering, the tech that splits busy zones into copies so servers don’t overload, will be tuned after launch. Players in the beta reported others vanishing as they looked across zone borders, and the team says it can change which zones are linked as the population settles. It has even floated letting players form armies much larger than a normal raid.