Blizzard's first WoW: Forever podcast covers gearing and pacing changes

The Eastern Kingdoms loading screen from the WoW Forever client

· ForeverDB

Blizzard has put out episode 1 of the official World of Warcraft: Forever podcast, with two developers and two content creators. Blizzard says it covers gearing and pacing changes. The details of those changes come from sites that watched the episode, not from a Blizzard post or the game files.

On September 28 the official World of Warcraft account posted on Bluesky that episode 1 of the World of Warcraft: Forever podcast covers gearing and pacing changes. The episode is on the World of Warcraft YouTube channel and runs about an hour.

Hear more about the gearing and pacing changes coming to World of Warcraft: Forever in episode 1 of the official Podcast! World of Warcraft, official account (on Bluesky)

What Blizzard has said officially

Blizzard's forum post and news article name who is on the episode:

Join Senior Game Designer Josh “Aggrend” Greenfield, Lead Classic Designer Tim Jones, and content creators Countdown To Classic and Xaryu in the first episode of the World of Warcraft: Forever Podcast. Blizzard (Watch the World of Warcraft: Forever Podcast, Ep. 1)

That is as far as Blizzard's written posts go. Blizzard has not published the gearing and pacing changes as beta notes yet, and there is nothing new to check in the client files for them. What follows is what other sites report the developers said in the episode.

Reports of what the podcast said, from sites that watched the episode. These are not a Blizzard post or client data, and not word for word quotes. Treat them as a report until Blizzard writes them up or they appear in a build.

Gearing: fewer blue rewards early on

Wowhead and Icy Veins report that the developers plan to pull back some blue-quality quest rewards in the early game, to keep progression closer to the older white to green to blue gear curve rather than handing out strong items too soon.

Pacing: levels 1 to 20

The same reports say Blizzard's data shows levelling from 1 to 20 is currently a little slower in Forever than in Classic Era. Some players had said the opposite, that Forever levels faster, but the reports say Blizzard's data puts the two games at nearly the same pace. The stated aim of the change is to have players level in the open world more often, instead of grinding in dungeons.

How this fits the last build

The September 24 beta notes already touched gear at low levels: Blizzard wrote that "A number of quest rewards now have the correct item level, and a small number of early caster rewards were adjusted." Whether the podcast's gearing plan is more of the same is not stated. More in our September 24 notes write-up.

Sources