WoW Forever: new raids will still raise your power

Blizzard has spelled out what it means by horizontal progression in WoW: Forever, and it turns out to be mostly about the world rather than about your gear. Clay Stone, speaking alongside Holly Longdale in an interview around PAX Australia, described it as the game growing sideways: new zones, quests, dungeons and raids, and more depth in the professions and the legacy system.

Gear is the part that is not horizontal. New raid tiers will raise character power, Stone said, but the team wants the steps between them as small as it can make them. No numbers were given.

What that buys is a longer life for old loot. Single pieces from earlier tiers should stay among the best available for a long while, and older dungeons should keep a reason to go back. Vanilla and Classic are named as the model, where particular items stayed wanted across several raid tiers rather than being swept away by the next one.

It is not a promise that anything stays best forever, though. Items can still be replaced later, and asked whether the gear curve will eventually need a soft reset, Stone deliberately left that open. The direction is set; the ceiling is not.