WoW Forever: faster hunter and wand shots on the beta are a bug

On 23 September Blizzard community manager Kaivax wrote on the official forums that a bug on the WoW Forever beta affects Auto Shot, the hunter's automatic ranged attack, and shooting with a wand. Both are meant to have a cast time of 0.5 seconds before the shot fires, and the character has to stop to take the shot. Because of the bug, that cast time is much shorter, so hunters and wand users do not need to stop to shoot for as long as intended. Blizzard says it will fix this in an upcoming beta build, "hopefully next week".

Wands are ranged weapons for casters; in Classic, mages, priests and warlocks can use them. The pause matters when a player keeps moving away from an enemy while still hitting it, which players call kiting: the shorter the stop before each shot, the easier it is to stay out of reach. Players noticed the faster shots soon after the beta opened, and early reports on 21 September presented them as a change to the game. Some players in the thread say they took them for a deliberate improvement rather than a bug.

Replies to the post are split. Many players say the faster shots made hunters and wand users much smoother to play, and ask Blizzard to keep them and balance the classes around them. Others say the fix is needed for balance. One player writes that some hunters were using the faster shots to lead elite monsters to guards in Winterspring, and another says that hunters who can kite this freely are unbalanced in PvP. Some players also say that wands on the beta get stronger with a character's spell damage, and one says they do over 100 damage per shot at low levels. These are players' reports; Blizzard's post does not mention wand damage.

Players in the thread also raise other hunter issues, such as a melee swing delaying the next Auto Shot; other players argue that this works as designed. As of 24 September, Blizzard has not replied to any of them in the thread. This is not the only beta problem Blizzard has taken on in public: on 21 September it described changes to routing for EU testers who had trouble with lag.

Blizzard's post treats the 0.5-second cast time as the intended design and says nothing about changing it for launch. The beta runs until 21 October, so if the fix arrives in the week Blizzard hopes for, testers will still have about 2 to 3 weeks to try hunters and wands with the intended pause. WoW Forever launches at 23:00 UK time on 4 November, which is midnight on 5 November in Central Europe.