8 New Things We Just Learned About World Of Warcraft: Forever From Its Lead Designers

Blizzcon 2026 just concluded, with its opening ceremonies ending on a banger of an announcement: World of Warcraft: Forever. This alt-universe World of Warcraft is tailor-made for people who crave the nostalgic experience of the slow-paced, Classic WoW, but who don’t just want to replay the same dungeons and raids again and again and again. I managed to get some hands-on time with the game at the show and had a lovely experience, and afterward I sat down with lead Classic designer Tim Jones and lead encounter designer Mike Nuthals to grill them about their imminently-launching creation (it’s out on November 4!). There’s a lot of information floating around out there about Forever from all the deep dives and other interviews, so rather than put you through yet another Q&A, here’s 8 things I learned from them about Forever that I haven’t seen floating around anywhere else yet: Forever won’t have any wacky class/role combos (such as Shaman Tanks) like in Season of Discovery at launch One of the most beloved features of Season of Discovery was the use of runes to allow some classes to play roles they normally couldn’t, such as shaman tanks and mage healers. As a shaman player myself, I was hoping we’d get something like that again. Over the weekend, a bunch of different abilities like Spirit Weapons and Molten Blast started showing up on different WoW websites, suggesting that such a thing might be possible, but when I played Forever I didn’t see any of that stuff in the reworked Shaman skill tree. It wasn’t the same as the Classic tree, but it was closer to Classic than what I was seeing online. So I asked Jones and Nuthals about this, and unfortunately, Jones said that “there’s a lot of fun and exciting things in Season of Discovery, but even the design choices that we made in SoD, when we measure them against what our pillars are for WoW Forever, they don’t make sense in terms of the simplicity or the identity that we want for some classes to have.” He continued, saying that the team was starting from “a baseline of simplicity that’s more adjacent to the Classic game than Season of Discovery was.” That, to me, says no shaman tanks, or at least not super viable ones. But Jones added that the team wants to “keep the conversation open with players” and asks people who are passionate about classes in unusual roles like this to speak up. © Blizzard Every raid tier will have at least one 10-person option and one 20-person option I asked Jones and Nuthals about the lack of flex raiding, and concerns that this would be a massive barrier to some groups who may want to play together. After all, in Season of Discovery, a lot of raid groups dropped the game when raids jumped from requiring ten players to 25. Nuthals says flex raiding is right out, but did confirm that every single tier would have at minimum one 10-player option and one 20-player option, in addition to (sometimes) a 40-person raid. So if your group is too small for the 40 or 20-person raids, you can still do a raid with 10. “If you’re a 10-man group and you don’t have interest in doing 20-man content, that is perfectly fine,” Jones said. “We want to make sure that there is challenge and rewards in the 10-player content and there will always be a 10-player raid for groups every single tier forever.” It costs more gold to than before to train to ride a mount I actually asked Jones and Nuthals a question about the Skyborne elves being paywalled behind a $30 purchase, and whether or not we should expect more gameplay-related content to be behind paywalls in the future. They declined to comment, saying they’re game designers and don’t make monetization decisions, which is fair enough. But Jones shared some comments briefly about wanting the effort players put into the game to matter, and added that they’ve “made design adjustments to make sure that effort is still required to obtain things like your mount. You still have to, we’ve readjusted the gold cost to not be on the mount itself, but on the training so that we’re not giving someone free training for a mount when they hit level 40, right? People still have to, if you see someone on a mount, it is reflective that they have spent time and effort into the game.” You still need a Warlock to summon your party members to dungeons and raids Meeting Stones still exist at the front of dungeons, but they don’t let you summon other players. They do open a new Looking for Group feature, which allows you to list and discover groups that are doing the activities you want to do, and find people more easily. But you still have to hoof it across the continent to each other if you don’t have a Warlock in the party to summon one another. “We think that those moments of downtime are important for social opportunities,” Nuthals said. “People are going to talk. I think it’s one of those choices where you can look at our pillars and be like, we need to preserve that downtime before we get into the dungeon. We’re like, we’re going to go kill monsters for 30, 40 minutes. Let’s have some time to get together, say hi, maybe ask about how someone’s day is and give players those opportunities to have those conversations. And that group ramp up time, I think is a big part of that.” © Blizzard Add-ons will be restricted in a similar way to how they are in retail Jones and Nuthals didn’t confirm specifics on how add-ons would work, but Nuthals did say that “the in-game or in-combat add-on disarmament where the programmatic, the calculations done to automate marking or communicating for players, we’re going to bring that over so that players will not have access to those kind of computational add-ons.” No one-button rotation in Forever This one might have been obvious, but this feature won’t be carrying over. PvP will have a new progression system Here’s how Jones explains it: “When you fight other players in Battlegrounds and complete Battlegrounds and complete PvP-related content, you’ll gain honor. That honor will help you progress through a ranking system, and within a season or within a patch cycle, you’ll be able to get to rank 14 within that patch cycle, and there are rewards, cosmetic rewards, as well as PvP armor that has stats on it that people will be able to obtain. We’re excited for people to jump into new battlegrounds like the Darkspear Islands to supplement the original Vanilla battlegrounds that people will be able to jump into. I think we want there to be the opportunity for PvP players to feel rewarded and feel like that there’s a real progression track for them.” “Forever” is a bold promise to players of a safe space to invest their time I asked Jones and Nuthals about the name “Forever”: is there something more “Forever” about this game than the current retail version of WoW? What does it mean? Here’s how Jones answered: “I think when you look at how people have played Classic versions of our game before, there’s always the afterthought of, what happens to my character? Why am I investing time into this character when I know that this experience will end? That this is a seasonal experience or another expansion will come along the way? I think the beauty about World of Warcraft: Forever is we have a level 60 cap. We are going to continue to build content horizontally for players. We have things like the legacy system that encourage people to roll alts. We are going to continue to build content for every aspect of this game. The “forever” is really a promise of this is a safe place to make a character where everything that you invest your time in will matter forever.”