WoW Forever Beta Build 1 — Full Breakdown & Transcript

[00:00] Hey folks, this is Kalani. The first new build for the WoW Forever beta just went live, and it includes a whole bunch of changes. Some of the most overpowered racial abilities have been nerfed quite considerably.

[00:13] We have our first round of class changes and talent adjustments. There are a whole bunch of huge bug fixes and new weather effects in certain zones. We also have some information about the future of WoW Forever, and the dev team has started punishing players for questionable names,

[00:31] even going so far as to remove players from the beta entirely. Now, before we jump in, be sure to hit on that like button and subscribe so you never miss another video. First up, this beta build nerfs one of the most powerful racials that was introduced in WoW Forever.

[00:47] Gnomes have a new racial called Eureka. It has a 2 minute cooldown and reduces the cost of your next 3 abilities and increases their damage by 10%. The effect was different depending on your class, so Rogue's got a 20% reduced energy cost on those 3 abilities,

[01:03] Warrior's got 40% reduced rage costs, Mage and Warlock's got 50% reduced mana costs, and Priest's got 15% reduced mana costs and 10% damage and healing on their next 3 spells.

[01:15] This was widely considered one of the most powerful racial abilities for almost all classes, but especially classes with limited resources like warriors or rogues.

[01:27] Almost halving the rage cost of big hitting abilities would have been crazy, and the 20% reduced energy cost let known rogues get some insane openers, which would have been very powerful in PvP especially.

[01:41] So it's no surprise that the dev team reigned this racial in just a tad. Now, every version reduces the cost of your next three abilities by 10%, so it doesn't matter if you use Rage, Energy, or Mana,

[01:53] you'll save 10% of your cost when you use Eureka. The damage and healing bonus remains at 10%, which still makes this a great racial, it's just not quite as overpowered as it used to be.

[02:06] The dev team have also changed the respect cost for the beta only, and I do want to emphasize this is only for the beta to facilitate quick respecs and talent swaps for testing purposes. But moving forward, the cost to respec will be one silver,

[02:20] and even though the subsequent cost will increase, it will reset back down to one silver after an hour has passed. So as long as you wait about an hour in between your respecs, you should be able to respec as much as you want

[02:33] to test out all the talent variations you can think of while in the WoW Forever beta. Just remember that this will not be the case when the game goes live, so it's probably worth spending the time now figuring out your initial talent points

[02:46] to save yourself the time and money respeccing when the game launches for real. We also have some huge quality of life updates for campfires. You will now be able to buff each other, cast spells and craft items

[02:59] while waiting the minute to get your campfire buff. So you don't have to just sit and wait for that minute anymore, you can help out your fellow adventurers, or even get to work on some profession stuff that you've been putting off.

[03:11] You can now also have a bit more fun with your emotes. You'll be able to get your campfire buff if you're sitting, sitting in a chair, sleeping, lying down, or using the kneel emote. So you don't have to just sit down, you can have a bit more fun with the minutes that you're sharing your campfires.

[03:29] There are also a lot of bug fixes in this new build, including fixes for caster animations not working properly, human death sounds have been adjusted, the memory leak has apparently been fixed, so you shouldn't have to log out once every hour to get your frames reset,

[03:44] and the in-game mail should be fixed as well. So even if you have the same first name on multiple characters, you should be able to send mail properly once again. There have also been many adjustments to quest areas or mobs

[03:58] to increase spawn rates of items you need to pick up, increase spawn rates of T-Quest NPCs, some spawn rates have actually been reduced, and the mother fang in Elwynn no longer always drops a green item,

[04:10] so it's good the dev team are catching that kind of thing early on in the beta. That's what this test is for, after all. The DPS messenger will spawn more often in Westfall, and a few quests have their kill counts reduced so there a lot of fine going on all over the current playable areas Now you may have seen the videos popping up everywhere about new weather effects coming

[04:33] to the WoW Forever beta, and we didn't have to wait very long at all, you can now stumble upon actual rainstorms while out in Elwynn Forest. We're not too sure how many zones will have this increased weather, and how far the dev team will go with this, but weather

[04:48] Weather effects have always been a highly requested feature in all versions of WoW, so I guess it should come as no surprise that WoW Forever gets them first. Let me know if you run into any cool weather effects out in the game, and what zone you

[05:02] find them in. I'd love to know what else we have to look forward to. There have also been quite a few class changes in this updated build. Druid saw some bug fixes to let Rejuvenation and Tranquility land critical hits.

[05:16] math, base damage was increased by about 50%, so it shouldn't feel quite as terrible rapping on your druid before you get your hands on some spell power. Thorns will now dynamically update its values

[05:28] based on caster spell power. If the caster is too far away, it will revert to its base value. So no more snapshotting thorns or dishing out crazy thorns buffs to everyone out in the world.

[05:40] For hunters, Furious Howl had its attack power bonus reduced by 40%, so rip wolves, I guess. Sonic Blast is now properly available to bat pets, and you won't be able to tame beasts that are a higher level than you anymore,

[05:53] and then counting out of Lone Wolf will no longer give you a 4% damage reduction debuff while you have a pet active. Mages are a pretty big change for Arcane Missiles. It no longer checks Liner's fight for each missile,

[06:05] so as long as you've got clear LOS to start the cast, each missile will hit even if targets move out of Liner's sight. The Wake of Fire and Hot Street Buffs have their duration increased to give you more time to make use of them,

[06:17] and Ignite will no longer double-dip on percentage damage increase modifiers. Paladins have quite a lot of bug fixes. Rett Aura now dynamically updates its values, so no more snapshotting there either.

[06:30] Holy Sight has been buffed at every rank except the first one, so it will deal more damage as you level up and get those higher ranks. Its cooldown was also lowered to 10 seconds baseline, and the talent that reduced its cooldown has been removed.

[06:44] Holy Power now increases the crit strike chance of Holy Strike by 15% total, and then for the Rat Tree, Vengeance now activates off of non-periodic crit strikes, and its max stacks were reduced to 3. The two-handed specialization Talent was nerfed down to a 6% maximum bonus,

[07:00] Sacred Arbiter's damage bonus for Holy Strike was doubled, and Twist of Light was buffed to also reduce the mana cost of your seals. So quite a few changes for Rat Pardon already, and we're only about a week into the beta.

[07:14] Charmands have some big updates as well. Lightning Bolt damage at Rank 3 and Rank 4 is increased to make sure those spells are always upgrades, even with the cast time changing. Wind Fury Totem and Flame Tongue Totem will display slightly differently,

[07:27] and Flame Tongue Totem no longer has a duration. It's instantly replaced when you place a new Totem. It can no longer be stacked by repeatedly casting the Totem, and it no longer stacks with Flame Tongue Weapon or Wind Fury Totem.

[07:40] That sounds like some interesting shenanigans were going on, but either way, that's quite a few changes for just one ability. So the Elemental Talent Tree, Elemental Fury, and Elemental Alacrity have swapped places,

[07:52] and Lava Burst Rank 1 and 2 have their damage increased to make sure they're always a bit better than Lightning Bolt at around the same level. And then Ranger the Farseer down at the bottom of the Enhancement Tree no longer increases your spellcasting speed.

[08:06] The only other class with impactful changes is Warrior. Thunder Armor now applies the correct amount of threat at all ranks, A few talent swapped positions in the protection tree, and then for the arms tree, Bloodthrill's chance to trigger was doubled at all ranks, but it now only activates for main hand melee attacks, including Creep and Heroic Strike.

[08:25] That should normalize the talent, even while dual wielding. Slam's cooldown has increased baseline, and Improved Slam now reduces the cooldown by 1.5 seconds per talent point. So, I guess the dev team really weren't kidding when they said they were going to fine-tune classes and talent trees to make sure we have plenty of options in this version of WoW.

[08:45] I know their goal is to make every spec tree viable so it be interesting to see just how much balance tuning classes actually get as we level up further How do you feel about classes being balanced this time around Let me know what you think in the comment section below

[09:01] Something else that's new in this build is the cooldown manager. It's been in the settings since WoW Forever Beta started, but it wasn't working at all until now. Druids, mages, priests, warriors and warlocks should be able to turn on the cooldown manager

[09:15] to give you another way to track important spells, buffs, and item cooldowns. So I guess this is another retail feature that WoW Forever will actually have full access to. It was created kind of like a replacement for Weak Oris when the add-on changes started happening,

[09:30] so if you're familiar with those kinds of tracking add-ons, that's kind of what you can set up here. Curiously, I think the default cooldown manager will actually fit in better with WoW Forever when compared to retail, simply due to having less to keep track of.

[09:45] So have a tinker about with the various options in here, if it's working for you, and see if it's something you'd like to use in this new game mode. If you're keen to provide feedback, the dev team said the most desired feedback right now

[09:57] is what spells you wish were tracked by default, so if there's something missing, be sure to let the dev team know. From the list of changes we've seen so far, they are very obviously listening to feedback. We have even more news to go over from the first episode of a new WoW Forever podcast on the WoW Official Channel, which is super cool.

[10:18] Apparently, this could be a weekly thing with different devs sitting down to talk about all things WoW Forever, so if you're hungry for more information, keep an eye out for future episodes. Some key takeaways from this first episode include a change for how rewarding dungeon quests are going to be.

[10:33] Right now you can get quite a lot of blue items very quickly for completing quests tied to the new dungeons, Hall of Thanes and Ruins of Lordaeron. Typically most dungeon quests wouldn't have a gear reward tied to them,

[10:45] or at least not a blue gear reward, especially at this lower level. So they chatted about it for a good minute or two, and they said they might tone things down a bit so the quests more closely resemble things like Wailing Caverns,

[10:58] and how the quests work in that dungeon. Now, we actually have a tweet from one of the devs about this change specifically. Most quest rewards from early dungeons will be changed to greens instead of blues, with the exception of the main capstone quests for the dungeon.

[11:12] They're also tinkering around with stats on gear and doing a second flavour pass, so dungeons won't reward quite as many shiny pieces of gear as before, but it sounds like you'll still get at least a few greens for your efforts, and the huge experience rewards are still more than worth chasing after.

[11:27] They're also going to be looking at the amount of experience that you get from dungeon monsters versus dungeon quests, and if players think the nerves to the monsters are too harsh, they might dial things back a bit. This is something they're looking for feedback on,

[11:41] but really don't want players to be farming dungeons back to back to level up their characters. Speaking of leveling, despite a lot of players thinking WoW Forever leveling is significantly faster when compared to classic or era leveling speeds, the dev team has the actual numbers,

[11:57] and the average time to get to level 20 in Classic was apparently 20.4 hours, and the average time to level to 20 in WoW Forever sits at 20.5 hours. So not only is it more or less the same, but it's actually just a tiny bit longer in WoW Forever.

[12:14] Part of that is probably due to stopping to check out every little new thing here and there, but even taking that into account, it's still kind of funny that leveling really isn't all that different from what it used to be.

[12:26] They also discuss a lot of community feedback for things like the Skyborne race, several key issues that they're working on, like layering acting a bit odd when you're joining or starting groups, which is a bug and should definitely get fixed.

[12:38] They also talk a little bit about what zones you might see in future updates, specifically name-dropping Jorneus, Uldum, and Keltalath once again. So we will be revisiting those areas, zones, and races.

[12:50] It just might take a little while. Now from a different interview with the dead team we also know that not every update will be focused just on adding end game content only for players already up at level 60

[13:04] As the months roll by the dead team will shore up any obvious gaps in leveling content as well adding in new leveling zones where it makes sense and new dungeons for level brackets where your options start to dwindle so we could see new level 30 dungeons or zones or new level 50 zones and dungeons to change things up and encourage players to create new characters

[13:24] which should also lean into the legacy system quite well. That doesn't mean Endgame won't see new stuff all that often, though. The dev team will be consistently delivering new 10 and 20 player content,

[13:36] potentially even every patch. The little roadmap that we have to preview from BlizzCon does include a new 10 and 20 player raid in the spring update, as well as a revamped iconic raid and another new raid in the summer update.

[13:49] Getting two new raids per patch is kind of insane, so I am very much looking forward to that. Curiously, in this same interview, the idea of retail and forever borrowing content or features from each other came up,

[14:01] with the potential of retail copying the camping feature later on down the line, and housing in particular coming into focus for WoW Forever. Housing was one of the largest features recently introduced to World of Warcraft,

[14:14] and it must have been a huge undertaking. It's also been a huge success from how the dev team talk about it. But I do wonder if it would work all that well in the classic setting of Forever. It would definitely need to look quite different,

[14:27] but it's something the dev team are at least thinking about as they look to the future of this game mode. What do you think of the possibility of housing coming to WoW Forever? If that's something that could even work, let me know what you think in the comments section below.

[14:42] And then to round out this video, Blizzard recently announced that they will be punishing players who are violating the Code of Conduct in the WoW Forever beta, mainly focusing on folks with questionable naming conventions.

[14:54] With the updated beta build, those punishments have started rolling out, and it seems like players are either receiving a forced name change for the dodgy names, or they're actually losing access to the WoW Forever beta if the names were deemed bad enough.

[15:08] In the blue post, they note that they have removed beta access for some users who created names that were far outside of the code of conduct. So I guess the further you push the limits here, the more severe your punishment will be, which makes sense.

[15:21] Over the last week, I've seen some interesting names, some cool names, some funny names, and a lot of awful names. I'm surprised that some names even made it past the filters, and I'm even more surprised that some folks would want to name their characters that.

[15:36] Like, you're running around with that above your head. I'm sure it gets a chuckle from a handful of folks, but some names were incredibly distasteful, with others being provitriol. But the worst offenders won't be in beta anymore.

[15:50] Apparently this process was also done manually by the WoW dev team, names were individually reviewed, and they won't entertain any appeals. In addition to all of that, the system for enforcing naming standards will be coming online shortly, and they ask players to refrain from testing this system as you run the risk of being actioned and losing access to the beta.

[16:12] Now, needless to say, there have already been a lot of posts on Reddit and the Ralph Lawrence of players complaining that they were wrongly banned from beta, and their names weren't anywhere near bad enough to warrant a ban. But Tom Ellis actually took to Twitter very quickly to say anyone complaining that they're removed from the beta for a not-so-bad name simply aren't telling the truth.

[16:33] Multiple people read through every name that was removed from beta, including Tom, and he even noted that they can see every character you create, not just the ones you play. So they may have been taking all created characters into account here, not just the ones you actively logged into and played for a while.

[16:51] But that's all of the updates for this new WoW Forever Beta build, and what to expect from the future, so that's it for this video. What do you think of players being kicked out of the beta? And how do you feel that class is actually getting balanced human changes in Forever?

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