As someone who has been waiting so long for classic+ I'm honestly genuinely concerned for WOWF and its future.

The whole beta has felt more like a Season of Discovery type experiment where they are still chucking a lot of stuff at the wall to see what sticks, weeks before release. Typically in a beta you'd expect the game to be finished and the team would be at the bug fixing stage alongside minor changes.

We haven't even got to level 31+ content yet!

Then we have the conflicting statements at Blizzcon, versus what they are actually implementing.

1) The classic art style is supposed to be preserved, yet much of the new content they are adding is of retail art style, dropped into the classic art style world.

2) The social experience is one of their pillars, yet they've added mega servers and a completely bust layering system that is completely counter to this.

3) They've added a race that nobodies heard of, or asked for that looks like it's straight out of retail instead of adding classic lore friendly races.

4) Horizontal progression, as repeatedly mentioned at Blizzcon, is in fact not in the game. There is horizontal type content, but character progression is vertical as it is in all other wow versions. So how will our characters and their progress stay relevant with "forever" power creep?

5) Datamined stuff coming out is looking increasingly retail.

Honestly I really hope it's good, but I'm worried that in 6-12 months this game isn't going to look anything like classic+, but instead more like a retail mix up.

Honestly, 90% of this sub is just absurd doomerism about the state of Forever. I have never seen a more utterly miserable community of people online than what I've seen from this sub since Forever was announced. The sub is borderline unusuable, and is generally quite unpleasant to browse

For everyone losing their minds due to data miners 🤠😂

While all the data mining could simply be leftover data from an implemented retail build, I think it's healthy for people to speak up about it! Just in case it's not....

They had us in the first half, ngl.

Besides the

1. Obvious power increase due to spell/talents optimizations and additions and
2. The buffs from professions,
3. There is also the fact that the main core of the game is 20 years old. Players across the board in their majority are either experienced with wow or experienced with gameS in general OR have access to the internet and thousands of guides and youtube videos.

TLDR: Buff all the dangers of the world (mostly mobs) to counter 1,2,3 and maintain the difficulty curve of classic.

These updates have brought us one massive step towards erasing race identity.

In classic human and orc warriors had different BIS, and even slight variations in builds. These gave huge weight to the theme and feel of these races.

Now we've erased it before we've even launched.

'b-b-but my orc mage doesn't benefit from axe specialization!" Easy solution. Give orc mages access to axes. Human priests swords. Dwarf hunters maces.

This not only solves the problem of feeling like you have a useless racial, but also goes on to further enhance racial identities.

Instead of giving dwarves and tauren an identical racial, perhaps contrasting would be better. 1h specialization for the stunty boys, and the 2h specialization for the beefy lads.

But no, we have to cry, kick, and scream simply because one race/class combo gets something that my race/class combo doesn't. Classic + hasn't even launched, and we're already blending it all into a bland and empty retail -

Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

I just tried to heal with HPal at level 30 in 4 separate dungeon runs, and ALL of them were abysmal. It's going to be even worse at 60, due to HS hitting for less than a fraction of what Riptide does, and on a LONGER CD. It's not even worth pressing that spell. I tried it out, and I just started using FoL/HL instead, because it just wasn't worth the mana cost..

Why does it feel like Blizzard is ONLY listening to PvP streamers when it comes to class balance these days? Don't they have ANY other source of feedback?

I'm not even saying HPal has to be good.. I'm saying AT LEAST make it.. heal... SOMETHING.

Hey Blizz - Shockadin isn't the only thing we want from HPal. PvP isn't the only thing people are going to play. Remember PvE? Remember us? Of course not.. how could you? You only do podcasts with PvP streamers...

What a joke..

Seriously this is what the sub sounds like 24/7. Why do you people even play this game.

They said they don't want homogenization.

Meanwhile racials just got changed to:

Tauren 2% crit value, Dwarf 2% crit value

Human 2% crit chance, Orc 1% crit chance

/slowclap

The weapon specializations gave the races flavors, and made it more likely to see players of the given race using their "matched" weapon.

Boo hoo, throws the wrench into perfectly balancing endgame itemization? How is that a problem with horizontal progression, where you'd be able to find the BiS that works for you anyway?

Oh wait, we're back to vertical now. And seems like we're also back on the homogenization track.

I swear, sometimes I think WoW players enjoy complaining about the game more than actually playing it.

Every time a patch comes out, it's the same thing. One racial gets nerfed, another gets buffed, and suddenly the entire game is ruined. People are threatening to reroll factions, uninstall, and act like Blizzard personally came to their house and stole their lunch money.

Alliance is overpowered. Horde is dead. This class is unplayable. That racial is useless. The sky is falling.

And half the time, the patch hasn't even been out long enough for anyone to properly test anything.

Don't get me wrong, criticism is fine. Some changes are bad, some things genuinely need fixing, and Blizzard absolutely deserves feedback when they get things wrong. That's part of playing a game that's constantly being updated.

But there's a difference between giving feedback and throwing a tantrum because your favorite race lost a percentage point somewhere.

It's especially funny watching people argue over tiny differences in damage while playing a game where half the fun is the friends you make, the guild you play with, and the ridiculous stuff that happens along the way.

If one racial change makes you immediately abandon your faction, maybe you weren't that attached to the faction in the first place.

And let's be honest, if Blizzard reversed every single change because Reddit complained about it, we'd be right back here next patch complaining about something else.

Play what you enjoy. Give constructive feedback. Test the changes before declaring the game dead.

It's a video game, boys. We're supposed to be having fun.

The patch notes aren't a personal attack on your character. 😂

The most selfish and self entitled community out there.

God forbid a game be designed for someone other than them.

Can we kick them from the subreddit already? I'm sick of them pitching their awful ideas

that'd be great

-paladins

I made a side-by-side comparison of certain animations in Classic and Forever, and noticed something missing

Clearly, a devastating blow to the game's integrity.

Jokes aside, Blizzard's implementation of the models on top of the newer game client seems pretty lazy.

there is no problem here, they are working on it

There is just no end to mages crying and being emo. Acting like the world is completely doomed after 1 nerf or similar, shoving tons of boosts under the rug nothing to see there.

There is just no other class filled with such pampered entitled criers, since wow was came they are the pet class of blizzard and it shows like a child that never learned moderation they cry and cry and cry!

Why does blizzard hate what I love. Enhance damage was nerfed for no reason in this patch. Fire nova damage was gutted and the spell power coefficient was gutted as well.

Then they said hey enhance is almost complete dog shit but we can do better, so they changed windfury procs to white damage instead of special attack damage. So now we can have some glancing blow windfurys to drag us down even more.

Blizzard then looked at enhance and said I’m tired of pretending I don’t hate this class, let’s make grace and windfury work together again but let’s make them fucking raid wide so no one wants to bring shitty shaman dps specs.

Might as well change their name to De-enhance shaman. Probably should add a nerf to let us accidentally heal the fucking enemy in fights at this point.

Am i right? Layering sucks

Blizzard has already confirmed that Rated Battlegrounds are not coming anytime soon, at least in the short-mid term future, so I've been working on creating this website for the PvP community.

rbgs.io is similar to what FACEIT does for Counter-Strike: queue up with your character, select a role (FC/DPS/Healer), the matchmaking will use your role and mmr/rating to form a balanced game, join the Wargame and play, win rating and climb the ladder throughout competitive seasons. SoloQ and Premade queues.

The website uses an ingame addon and a desktop App companion:

• The addon helps organising the Wargame making it as automated as possible, and captures snapshots of the battleground scoreboard data periodically during the match (Flags/HKs/Damage/Healing/Deaths, etc).
• Addons can't make HTTP calls so it can't communicate with the website to send the results, so we use the companion to read the data that the addon is saving and sends it to the website after the match is finished (the same way WarcraftLogs companion gets the log file and uploads it to the website).

rbgs.io compares match data submitted by the players. A result is only confirmed once enough players have submitted the same result. If there are not enough reports or they vary too much, the match will remain pending for manual verification by the staff.

It's still a work in progress project, the WoW:Forever beta doesn't provide an API yet, and the Wargames system will be enabled shortly after the release (confirmed at the WoW: Forever Podcast #4), so we depend on those features until we can start the first competitive season, I'm making this post in order to get feedback and people interested in beta testing before I can release a finished first version.

P.S. This is not a vibecoded project, I work as a software developer and the project is definitely AI-assisted, while staying responsible for the architecture, reviewing the code and testing myself.

Every time new Forever assets get datamined, whether it’s a mount, armor set, or something else, it feels more and more like the impassioned presentation at BlizzCon about preserving the Classic art style as a core design pillar was just empty rhetoric. Between the use of retail character skeletons, SD models apparently not even being an initial consideration, blue elves, and the increasingly retail looking assets, it’s hard to feel like they’re taking that commitment seriously.

Classic’s distinctive art style is a fundamental part of its identity and one of the things players love most about it. Conversely, the shift in art direction over the years is one of the things many Classic players actively dislike about modern WoW. We want new content that looks and feels like it belongs in Classic, not retail visuals repackaged for Classic+.

The issue isn’t new assets. It’s that so much of what we’re seeing feels disconnected from Classic’s original visual identity.

Do Blizzard and Classic players just have fundamentally different ideas of what “preserving the Classic art style” actually means? Or was all that talk at BlizzCon just hype marketing while the actual plan was to reuse retail assets for efficiency?

Seriously this is hilariously tone deaf

Alliance racials were already competitive and/or better for every single class for both pve and pvp.

Now there isnt a single class who wouldnt prefer alliance besides shamans I guess (they cant be human or gnome)

Not touching escape artist and will to survive but decimating touch of the grave seems mean spirited at this point.

God forbid undead have a good dps racial for once in 22 years

Whining over

Much of the vitriol and hate being perceived is in large due to these bots, and so reporting+blocking is probably the best thing to do to make sure Forever discussion/feedback/criticism/praise is kept healthy.

I went through some of the recent threads over the last few days and many of the anti-feedback comments and more generally those promoting contrarian views with no real sustenance are frequently bots (or regular trolls). Obviously some real people naturally hold those positions, but many of the arguments happening are being started/fueled by troll/karma bots.

Above is probably the most egregious bot I've seen so far, but I've blanked their username for rule #3.

Instead of just pointlessly debating with them, take a quick second to at least verify account ages. There's also some username patterns especially commonly used by bots (the default, but obviously many real people have them too).