WoW Forever: hidden item stats, no dungeon journal at first

Blizzard is hiding the stats of every item in WoW Forever, according to senior game designer Josh Greenfield. He said so in a BlizzCon interview published on 15 September. In his words, you will not see an item's stats until it drops for you or for someone on your server. As a result, he said, nobody will go into the first raid tier knowing their best-in-slot list: the list of the best item for each gear slot.

Greenfield expects the first week to be a free-for-all, with players picking up items and the details going up on fan sites as they go. He said this will change the early meta a great deal: the builds and gear choices most players settle on and copy. Players will still discover things, write guides and draw up best-in-slot lists, he said, but he thinks Blizzard is committed to continuing to shake that up. Forever, he said, is not a game without changes: Blizzard is going to adjust classes and all kinds of other things, including the content itself.

Greenfield said players will not know which raid bosses they are going to fight until they go in for the first time, and there will not be a dungeon journal telling them what to do, at least at first. In modern WoW the dungeon journal is the in-game guide to each boss's abilities and loot. He thinks this will be an adjustment for some Classic players. He also said Forever has discoveries, though not in the way of Season of Discovery, where player power was locked behind them, and a lot of secrets spread across the world that will take players a while to find.

Blizzard's recap of its BlizzCon deep-dive panel on Forever, published on 13 September, says the aim of its item changes is to keep the gameplay of Classic while 'unsolving' the path through it. None of Blizzard's recaps of its Forever panels at BlizzCon mentions hidden stats or the dungeon journal. So far both come from this one interview, and Blizzard has not confirmed them in its own posts.

Some questions stay open. Greenfield did not say what 'your server' will mean in Forever, which Blizzard describes as realmless: each ruleset works more like a broad community of players than a single traditional realm. He also did not say whether hidden stats already apply on the beta, which runs until 21 October, or whether a dungeon journal will come later.