You are running through Ashenvale and there is a campfire off the road with two people sitting at it. One of them is a Blacksmith and has dropped a Sharpening Wheel next to the flames. You walk over, take an hour of Attack Power off it, put down your own Incense Candle for whoever comes next, repair your boots at a vendor that exists because somebody lit a fire here, and carry on.
That is Camping, and it is the most interesting small idea in World of Warcraft: Forever. It is also the one most likely to trip you up, because two of its numbers look like they contradict each other and do not.
The ten minutes and the hour
The campsite is temporary. Blizzard's estimate is that a campfire and everything placed at it lasts about ten minutes.
The buff you take off it lasts an hour.
So a campsite is not a base. It is a pit stop somebody else built, and the correct instinct when you see one is to go and use it now rather than remember where it was. You get sixty minutes of value out of a fire that will be gone before you finish the quest you are on.
What a campsite gives you
Walk up to one and you get access to four things:
- Vendors
- Repairs
- Profession workspaces
- One-hour stat buffs from whatever objects are placed there
The vendors and repairs alone change how far you can push before a town run, which in a game with no flight paths worth the name until you have some levels on you is not a small thing.
Every profession object, and what it does
A Basic Campfire holds three objects. Each player at the fire can contribute one, and that contribution is on a 3,600 second cooldown, one hour, shared across every camping feature you have. You cannot stack a fire by yourself.
| Profession | Object | What it gives |
|---|---|---|
| Blacksmithing | Sharpening Wheel | Attack Power |
| Herbalism | Incense Candle | Intellect |
| Tailoring | Faction Banner | Spirit |
| First Aid | First Aid Kit | Stamina |
| Skinning | Camp Chair | 2% critical strike to everyone sitting nearby |
| Leatherworking | Camp Tent | Rested experience |
| Alchemy | Alchemy Lab | Flask crafting |
| Cooking | Upgraded Campfire | Raises the campsite limit to five, then ten |
That is the first object for each. Each profession has three across skill 1 to 300, and we keep the full list, with reagents and skill tiers, on the camping objects reference page rather than here, because that table will keep moving while the beta runs.
Cooking is the odd one and the important one. Cooks learn the Basic Campfire in the first place, and the upgraded versions are what turn a three-object fire into a five or ten object one. A camp with a good Cook at it is a different proposition entirely.
Leatherworking and Alchemy are worth reading twice, because those two are not buffs. Leatherworking's Tanning Rack, which arrives above its Camp Tent, is a requirement for recipes further up that tree, and the Alchemy Lab is where flasks get made. Those are workshop stations that happen to live at a campfire, which means some crafting in Forever now needs you to stop somewhere in the world rather than stand in a capital.
The catch nobody leads with: these do not stack with class buffs
The campsite buffs are variants of class buffs, and they do not stack with them.
The clearest example is First Aid. Its First Aid Kit gives Stamina, and it is a Power Word: Fortitude variant, so a Priest in your group makes it redundant. Same logic applies down the list: if you already have the raid buff, the campfire version is not adding to it.
This is a design choice, not an oversight, and it tells you who Camping is for. A five-person group with a Priest, a Druid and a Paladin in it already has most of this covered. A solo player levelling through the open world has none of it. That is the gap the system fills, and it is why the fires you find in the wild will matter more at level 23 than at level 60.
Plan your own object around what your group is missing, not around what your profession happens to be best at.
How you unlock them
Each profession gets three camping objects, learned as the skill goes from 1 to 300.
The first one comes at skill level 20. You learn it either from the camping NPCs Blizzard has put in the world to introduce the system, or from your ordinary profession trainer. Twenty skill is nothing, which is clearly deliberate: Blizzard wants people placing objects early, because a system built on other players needs other players in it from week one.
The advanced objects are a different story. Those come from Blueprint recipes that drop from specific dungeon bosses, which puts the good version of your campsite object behind five-player content. If you want the upgraded Cooking campfire that holds ten objects, you are going into a dungeon for it.
A warning if you play on PvP
Campsites are not Sanctuaries.
A fire in the wrong place on the PvP playstyle is a gathering of stationary players with their guard down, which is the single most attractive thing in open-world PvP. Blizzard has not built any protection into this. If you are lighting fires on PvP, light them somewhere with sightlines.
What this is actually for
Forever's stated goal is making the journey and the people on it matter again, and most attempts at that in MMOs amount to a chat channel and hoping. Camping is more honest than that. It gives you a reason to stop at a stranger, a reason to leave something behind for whoever arrives next, and a reason to care that the person at the fire took Cooking.
Whether it survives contact with a playerbase that optimises everything is the open question. Ten-minute fires and one-hour cooldowns suggest Blizzard has thought about the failure mode where somebody parks a permanent buff shop outside Orgrimmar. We will find out in the beta.
Three Legacy perks bend the numbers
The Legacy tree reaches into this system in three places, all of them datamined rather than announced: Field Guide cuts the camping cooldown by 8%, Permanence extends campsite duration by 50%, and Reagent Economy makes your first-tier camping objects cost nothing to craft.
Reagent Economy is the one to notice. The shared cooldown means you are placing an object roughly once an hour whether you want to or not, and paying leather and wood for the privilege every time adds up over a levelling run in a way a single tooltip does not suggest.
Still unknown
- Camping objects for Enchanting, Engineering, Mining and Fishing. Nothing has surfaced for any of them.
- Exact buff values for most objects. Published effects name the stat, not the number.
- Which dungeon bosses drop which Blueprint recipes.
- Whether campsite objects work indoors or in instances, and whether a camp survives its owner logging out.
- Whether the ten-minute estimate holds in the live build. Blizzard called it an estimate.
If you are picking a profession around this, the professions changes are worth reading first, because First Aid in particular is not the profession you remember. The class and race pages cover what your character can actually be, and the FAQ has the rest.
Cover art: Blizzard Entertainment, from the official World of Warcraft: Forever product page. HostedGG is not affiliated with or endorsed by Blizzard.
Sources: Beta client datamining via Wowhead for the Skinning objects, their reagents and the 3,600 second shared cooldown; Icy Veins for the Legacy perks and the rest timer; Blizzard's World of Warcraft: Forever Deep Dive panel recap for the three-object limit, the one-object-per-player rule, the one-hour cooldown, the Cooking upgrades, the skill 20 unlock, the dungeon Blueprint drops, and the Blacksmithing, Tailoring, Herbalism, Alchemy and Leatherworking objects; Warcraft Tavern for the First Aid Kit's Stamina buff and the confirmation that campsite buffs are class-buff variants that do not stack; Blizzard Watch for the three-objects-per-profession-across-1-to-300 progression and the note that campsites are not Sanctuaries; Icy Veins for Blizzard's roughly ten minute estimate on campfire duration.
