Blizzcon 2026 has just concluded, and its opening ceremonies ended with a big announcement: World of Warcraft: Forever. This alternate 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 over and over again. I managed to get a little hands-on time with the game at the show and had a lovely experience, and then sat down with Classics Lead Designer Tim Jones and Lead Encounter Designer Mike Nuthals to quiz them on their impending release creation (coming out November 4th!). There’s a lot of information floating around about Forever from all the deep dives and other interviews, so rather than subject you to another Q&A, here are 8 things I learned from them about Forever that I haven’t seen floating around anywhere else yet: Forever won’t have wacky class/role combinations (like 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 fill roles they normally couldn’t, such as shaman tanks and mage healers. As a shaman player, I was hoping we would have something like this 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 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 are a lot of fun and exciting things in Season of Discovery, but even the design decisions we made in SoD, when compared to our pillars for WoW Forever, don’t make sense in terms of the simplicity or identity we want some classes to have.” He went on to say that the team was starting from “a foundation of simplicity that is closer to the Classic game than Season of Discovery.” That, to me, means no shaman tanks, or at least not super viable ones. But Jones added that the team wants to “keep the conversation open with the players” and asks people who are passionate about classes in unusual roles like this to speak up. © Blizzard Each raid level will have at least one 10-person option and one 20-person option. I asked Jones and Nuthals about the lack of flexible raids and I’m concerned that this would be a huge barrier for some groups wanting to play together. After all, in Season of Discovery, many raid groups left the game when raids went from requiring ten players to 25. Nuthals says that flexible raids are out, but confirmed that each tier would have at least a 10-player option and a 20-player option, plus (sometimes) a 40-person raid. So if your group is too small for 40- or 20-person raids, you can still raid with 10. “If you’re a 10-person group and you have no interest in doing 20-person content, that’s perfectly fine,” Jones said. “We want to make sure there are challenges and rewards in 10-player content and that there will always be a 10-player raid for groups at every tier forever.” It costs more gold than before to train to ride a mount. In fact, I asked Jones and Nuthals a question about Skyborne elves being paid behind a $30 purchase, and whether or not we should expect more game-related content behind paywalls in the future. They declined to comment, saying they are game designers and don’t make monetization decisions, which is fair enough. But Jones briefly shared some comments about wanting the effort players put into the game to matter, adding that they’ve “made design adjustments to make sure it still takes effort to get things like your mount. You still have to do it, we’ve readjusted the cost of gold so it’s not in the mount itself, but in the training, so we’re not giving someone free training for a mount when they reach level 40, right? People still have to, if you see someone in a mount, it is a reflection that he has dedicated time and effort to the game.” You still need a warlock to summon your party members to dungeons and raids. Gathering Stones still exist at the front of dungeons, but they don’t allow you to summon other players. They open a new group search feature, allowing you to list and discover groups that do the activities you want to do and find people more easily. But you still have to cross the continent among yourselves if you don’t have a warlock in the party to summon each other. “We think those downtimes are important for social opportunities,” Nuthals said. “People are going to talk. I think it’s one of those options where you can look at our pillars and say, we need to preserve that downtime before we go into the dungeon. We thought, let’s kill monsters for 30, 40 minutes. Let’s have some time to meet, greet, maybe ask how someone’s day was and give the players those opportunities to have those conversations. And that group increases the time, I think is a big part of that.” © Blizzard Add-ons will be restricted similar to how they are in retail Jones and Nuthals didn’t confirm specific details about how add-ons would work, but Nuthals said that “disarming add-ons in-game or in combat where the programmatic, the calculations done to automate marking or communication for players, we’re going to bring that in so players don’t have access to those types of computational add-ons.” No single button rotation in Forever This might have been obvious, but this feature will not be carried 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 will gain honor. That honor will help you progress through a ranking system, and within a season or within a patch cycle, you will be able to reach rank 14 within that patch cycle, and there are rewards, cosmetic rewards, as well as PvP armor that has stats that people will be able to “We’re excited for people to jump into new battlegrounds like the Darkspear Islands to complement the original vanilla battlegrounds that people will be able to access. I think we want there to be an opportunity for PvP players to feel rewarded and feel like there’s a real progression track for them.” “Forever” is a bold promise to gamers of a safe space to invest their time. I asked Jones and Nuthals about the name “Forever”: is there anything more “Forever” in this game than the current retail version of WoW? What does it mean? Here’s how Jones responded: “I think when you look at how people have played classic versions of our game before, it always comes up with the idea of what’s happening to my character? Why am I investing time in this character when I know this experience is going to end? That this is a seasonal experience or that another expansion is coming down the road? I think the beauty of World of Warcraft: Forever is that we have a level 60 cap. We’ll continue to create content horizontally for players. We have things like the legacy system that encourages “To always” is really a promise that this is a safe place to create a character where everything you invest your time in will matter forever.
