Eight classes got tuned in the first World of Warcraft: Forever beta build. Rogue did not appear at all.
That is the fastest way to read build 1.60.1.70009, dated September 24, which landed about a week into the closed test. Druid, Hunter, Mage, Paladin, Priest, Shaman, Warlock and Warrior all picked up changes. The ninth Classic class is simply absent from the notes, and since Forever ships those nine and adds no tenth at launch, an untouched Rogue is a real data point rather than an oversight in the write-up.
There is a second reason this build matters more than its size suggests. When Blizzard ran the Deep Dive panel, it published the Paladin rework in full and explicitly did not publish talent specifics for the other eight classes. That gap is why our class pages carry an unpublished field instead of guesses. This build is the first time those eight have shown their working, and they are showing it as tuning numbers rather than as a reveal.
Every change, by class
| Class | What moved |
|---|---|
| Druid | Wrath base damage up roughly 50%. Rejuvenation, Tranquility and Wild Growth can all crit. Thorns now recalculates dynamically off the caster's spell power. Feral renames: Maim to Primal Bite, Primal Fury to Blood Frenzy |
| Hunter | Furious Howl attack power cut 40%. Ultrasound opens up to bats. Marksmanship's Lone Wolf opt-out no longer carries its 4% damage penalty. Survival's Rending Strikes can crit, and Longstrider Strike gives 30% movement speed for 3 sec |
| Mage | Arcane Missiles checks line of sight once instead of per missile. Fiery Trail 20 to 30 sec, Lucky Streak 15 to 20 sec. Ignite no longer double-counts damage modifiers |
| Paladin | Holy Strike moved to weapon-percent damage, 25/29/32/36/39/43/46/50% by rank, cooldown 12 to 10 sec, and Improved Holy Strike deleted. Retribution's Vengeance now triggers off non-periodic crits but drops from 5 charges to 3. Two-Handed Weapon Specialization 3/6/9% to 2/4/6% |
| Priest | Renew can crit. Power Word: Shield overwrites an existing shield when the target has no Weakened Soul. Gnomish Backup Plan can crit. Forsaken Dark Sacrifice stops removing breakable crowd control |
| Shaman | Lightning Bolt ranks 3 and 4 buffed. Flametongue Totem loses its duration and will no longer stack with itself, Flametongue Weapon or Windfury Totem. Elemental talents swapped position, Lava Burst ranks 1 and 2 up about 10%. Enhancement's Seer's Fury stops granting cast speed |
| Warlock | Voidwalker Sacrifice now scales from 10% of the caster's healing power |
| Warrior | Sunder Armor threat fixed across all ranks. Protection's Bastion and Focused Rage swapped. Arms: Blood Rapture proc chance doubled to 4/8/12/16/20%, and Slam's cooldown went 15 to 18 sec |
| Rogue | Nothing listed |
Two changes sit outside any class and will be felt by every caster: Wizard Oil is back to Classic Era values, and wands no longer scale with spell damage. If you had penciled in a wand as a stat stick, unpencil it.
Healing over time can crit now, and that is the real headline
Read the Druid and Priest rows together and a system change falls out of them. Rejuvenation, Tranquility, Wild Growth, Renew and the Gnome racial Backup Plan were all given the ability to crit in the same build. That is not five class tweaks. That is Blizzard deciding that periodic healing participates in the crit system, which in Classic it flatly did not.
The knock-on is that healing crit stops being a stat you tolerate and starts being one you build. Classic healers stacked +healing and treated crit as a rounding error precisely because their strongest throughput spells could not benefit from it. Change that and the itemisation conversation changes with it, which lines up with the talent pass that already folded Hit and Crit into one stat each and made healing gear stop being dead weight.
The one class Blizzard had already explained is the one it nerfed
Paladin is worth its own paragraph because of the asymmetry. It was the only class with a published rework going into beta, which meant it was the only class the community could theorycraft properly, and it has come out of the first tuning pass down on net: Vengeance lost two of its five charges, Two-Handed Weapon Specialization lost a third of its value, and a talent was removed outright.
Holy Strike is the interesting one rather than the punishing one. Moving to a weapon-damage percentage that climbs from 25% to 50% across its ranks, with the cooldown pulled in to 10 seconds, turns it from a flat-damage button into something that scales with your weapon. Improved Holy Strike being deleted is consistent with that: when the ability scales properly on its own, a talent that propped it up is dead weight.
Respecs cost one silver, with a catch
The beta is running a deliberately strange respec price. If you have not changed talents recently, a reset costs one silver. Immediately after you use it, the price jumps hard, and it falls back to one silver only after an hour.
It is an anti-spam curve rather than a discount, and it is explicitly temporary for the beta. Do not read it as the launch economy. What it does tell you is that Blizzard wants beta testers respeccing freely enough to actually test builds, which is the behaviour a one-silver floor buys and a Classic-style escalating gold cost does not.
A cooldown manager, for five classes
Forever now ships an optional ability tracker under Options, Gameplay Enhancement, and it is off by default. It currently supports Druid, Mage, Priest, Warrior and Warlock, and it does not yet understand spell ranks, which in a game where rank-downranking is a real healing technique is a meaningful gap rather than a cosmetic one.
Four classes are missing from it, and Blizzard is asking which spells should be tracked by default, so this is a first pass rather than a finished feature.
What this build does not settle
Plenty, and it is worth being precise about the gaps rather than filling them.
- Rogue. Absent from the notes. That could mean the class is landing where Blizzard wants it, or that its pass is queued behind the others. Nothing in this build distinguishes those.
- The other eight are tuning, not reveals. Knowing that Lava Burst ranks 1 and 2 went up about 10% does not tell you what Shaman's talent tree looks like. Blizzard still has not published full kits for eight of nine classes, and a patch note is not a kit.
- None of it is final. This is the first tuning build of a closed beta seven weeks ahead of the November 4 launch. Numbers in a first balance pass are the most likely thing in any beta to move again.
If you are still deciding what to roll, the class pages are the better starting point than a patch note, and the Forever versus Classic versus retail breakdown covers what the whole thing is actually trying to be.
Sources: the per-class numbers, the respec mechanic and the cooldown manager details are from wow.gg's beta tuning writeup and timesaver.gg's coverage of the same build, which agree on the build's contents and on the list of eight classes touched. Two discrepancies worth flagging: the outlets date the build September 24 and September 25 respectively, and timesaver refers to the doubled Arms proc as "Bloodthrill" where wow.gg calls it "Blood Rapture". The per-rank figures above follow wow.gg. Rogue's absence is an absence from both write-ups, not a stated "no changes" from Blizzard. Verified September 29, 2026.
