WoW Forever: rogues get Mutilate, warlocks get Banes

Blizzard's class deep dive for rogues is built around a talent that did not exist in the original game. Mutilate sits at the end of the first half of the Assassination tree: 60 energy, 2 daggers required, extra damage against a poisoned target and 2 combo points for 1 press. The tree then ends in Venom, a 25 energy finisher that raises poison damage by 30%, so the specialisation spends its combo points on keeping 2 effects running rather than on a single hit. Rogues can also wield one-handed axes now, which Blizzard says is about widening what counts as a usable drop.

Several old annoyances go with it. Sap no longer breaks stealth, which Blizzard explains by saying rogues should have crowd control nobody else has. Expose Armor now strips as much armour as 5 stacks of Sunder Armor and no longer blocks warriors from applying their own, so a rogue in the group stops being a reason not to bring one. Feint drops twice as much threat. Among the new talents, Flawless Execution takes 10 energy off Eviscerate, and Cutthroat lets a Backstab set up an Ambush without going back into stealth first.

The warlock half is mostly about curses. Curse of Agony and Curse of Doom are renamed Banes, and only 1 Bane fits on a target at a time; Curse of the Elements now raises damage from every school of magic rather than 2 of them, and Curse of Shadows is gone, which removes the old business of 2 warlocks quietly overwriting each other. Pets now take their stats from the warlock instead of from their own table, and Life Tap scales with spirit. Each tree ends somewhere new: Wrack for Affliction, a shadow effect that also pushes the warlock's other damage over time up by 10%, Demonic Pact for Demonology and Incinerate for Destruction.

Blizzard is working through the classes a pair at a time, as it did for hunters and druids, and has still not covered them all. Everything in it describes the game as it is meant to launch, not the beta as it stands today. The beta runs until 21 October, and WoW Forever opens at 23:00 UK time on 4 November, which is midnight on 5 November in Central Europe.