WoW: Forever's massive pre-launch balance patch breaks from the chains Classic power, increasing 'the health of higher level creatures to compensate'

WoW: Forever's massive pre-launch balance patch breaks from the chains Classic power, increasing 'the health of higher level creatures to compensate'

"Those reductions left some iconic abilities feeling lackluster, and closed the door to other potentially exciting design options."

"Over the course of Beta, we came to the realization that trying to hold ourselves roughly to Classic power budgets for each class meant that every new element we added needed to come at the expense of something else. Those reductions left some iconic abilities feeling lackluster, and closed the door to other potentially exciting design options."

"So over the last two weeks, we’ve raised damage on classes across the game, and have increased the health of higher level creatures to compensate. This additional 'headroom' has allowed us to tune things to a place that we hope feels better overall," via the official WoW forums.

This honestly makes the most sense to me—yes, there are some elements of Classic I want WoW: Forever to preserve. The slower, more relaxed pace and the time-to-kill (something that has been maintained to a deliberate, intentional degree) of oldschool MMOs, for one.

But if you're gonna do Classic+, you shouldn't have to limit yourself to the power and ability budgets that came out 20 years ago. You might as well go whole-hog and try to get things feeling a little more interesting, if still along the lines of that vanilla feeling.

The statement linked above, which was posted in a series of pre-release patch notes, continues: "Beyond that, some of this round of changes reflects areas where we were likely hasty in turning to Burning Crusade or Wrath-era solutions rather than carving out new ones that better fit into the Forever combat model.

"Our aim in class design is not perfect numerical equality, but rather for every class to feel valuable to the groups they join, with powerful, unforgettable moments brought on by mastering them. In Forever this is accomplished by doubling down on the strengths and differences that make each class unique, rather than overly unifying them."

Hear hear! Homogenisation is the death of interesting class design, and I've certainly played MMOs where that's been a massive problem (I am very much hoping that FF14's Evolved job reworks hit this mark). The patch notes themselves are interesting, too.

For starters, tanks have had their threat bonuses absolutely ramped. Warriors' defensive stance has spiked from a 30% to an 80% increase and Druid's bear form has been bumped from 50% to 115%, with similar threat generation buffs for Paladins. This is primarily to offset the removal of Blessing of Salvation, which seems smart to me—you probably shouldn't be balancing threat generation writ large over the spell of one class.

Rogues now have an ability called "Shank", an off-hand weapon energy generation tool—which has a different flavour for each specialisation. Combat rogues get more energy from it, Subtlety rogues can get extra combo points, and Assassination rogues can use it to debuff enemies to make them more vulnerable to their poisons.

This is just skimming the top of the iceberg—there have been a ton of changes: "We’ve used the data and feedback gathered during Beta testing to get everything tuned to a reasonable place. However, the only true test of that tuning is the game itself. With the exception of bugs and serious outliers, we don’t plan on making big tuning changes between now and the opening of the raids next month.

"Once we have sufficient data from players leveling past 30 and engaging in a wide range of content, we expect that we will do a large tuning pass based on our data. And this is all merely a starting point for the classes in Forever, which will continue to evolve over the course of the months and years ahead just as they did following the original launch in 2004."

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Harvey's history with games started when he first begged his parents for a World of Warcraft subscription aged 12, though he's since been cursed with Final Fantasy 14-brain and a huge crush on G'raha Tia. He made his start as a freelancer, writing for websites like Techradar, The Escapist, Dicebreaker, The Gamer, Into the Spine—and of course, PC Gamer. He'll sink his teeth into anything that looks interesting, though he has a soft spot for RPGs, soulslikes, roguelikes, deckbuilders, MMOs, and weird indie titles. He also plays a shelf load of TTRPGs in his offline time. Don't ask him what his favourite system is, he has too many.

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