WoW Forever: faster respawns at launch, full controller play

Blizzard has adjusted respawn rates across many areas of WoW Forever to cope with the crowds expected at launch. In its final development notes before release, it says the aim is to keep players from hitting hard bottlenecks. The new rates are faster in lower-level zones, fastest of all in the starting zones, and slow down gradually as you level and players spread out across the world.

Blizzard is clear that some competition for spawns will remain: it calls it part of the experience and says removing it is not the goal. Once the first surge of low-level characters has settled, the lower-level zones will go back to more typical rates, so the faster respawns are a launch measure rather than a permanent change.

Questing gets smaller fixes. Experience rewards have been adjusted on various quests, some prerequisites and level settings have changed to improve the flow across the world, and more quest objectives now have mouseover tooltips and map markers. Bags no longer equip themselves into an empty bag slot when you pick them up, so you now have to equip each new bag by hand.

Controller support has also reached what Blizzard calls a complete functional state. Movement, spells, interactions and interface navigation can all be played with a gamepad, and the settings can be changed through Edit Mode and the Options menu. That follows the first steps Blizzard described a few days ago, covered in our report on gamepad support.

The gamepad changes include skipping cinematics, ending a flight early so you dismount at the next flight point, setting a focus target, targeting friendly corpses, moving pets and choosing a ruleset on the character screen. For Europe, WoW Forever opens at midnight on 5 November in Central Europe, after a 5-hour maintenance on launch day.