WoW Forever: rogues to be the top single-target damage class

Blizzard published the 2nd episode of its WoW Forever podcast on 1 October, under the title Watch Now! WoW: Forever Podcast Ep.2, Speedrunning Classes. Host Countdown To Classic sits down with senior game designers Josh “Aggrend” Greenfield and Aidan Moon, principal game designer Kris Zierhut and guest Sodapoppin to go through how the classes of Forever are designed. We did not watch it: the episode is a video, and everything below comes from reports that summarise it, so the wording is theirs and not Blizzard's. Much of what the designers describe is already written out in Blizzard's class deep dives of 30 September, so what follows is what those articles do not say. One detail from the episode has already been corrected: this week only 1 battleground and 1 new dungeon are there to test, not the list named in the conversation.

The clearest statement in the episode is about rogues. Kris Zierhut said rogues will be the highest single-target damage dealers in the game, and that if rogues do not do the highest single-target damage, there is no reason for the class to exist. He put limits on it: he was talking about a boss fight where everyone stands still, mechanics left aside, and he added that rogues already take so much damage from auto attacks, Slice and Dice and poisons that it is easy to push them too far. Reports say he meant to reassure players who raid rather than those who fight other players. The designers also trailed a new rogue talent, called Death Mark in the conversation: it marks a target, and the damage done to that target then feeds a later extra hit. It is meant to replace an existing talent, and neither the final design nor the numbers were given.

Zierhut also gave a figure for class balance. As a rough guide, the damage specs of classes that can also tank or heal should sit about 5% behind the pure damage classes, warriors included; the designers call this a design goal and not a ranking that will hold in every fight. Where a spec heals while it deals damage, as shadow priests do, that healing counts towards what the spec brings, so the same top damage plus strong extra healing would be too much together. Damage hybrids should also not heal themselves so well that they hardly need other players. The team said it had tried a much shorter cooldown on Recklessness internally and found it so strong that the rest of warrior damage would have had to come down, so the long cooldown stays. It is also discussing raid-wide versions of auras that now reach only a party, such as Moonkin Aura and Leader of the Pack, which would cut the pressure to bring several players of the same class; that one is not promised.

For hunters, Blizzard plans more stable slots: it wants to start with a small number and add more as Forever goes on, and gave neither a figure nor a date. The team also confirmed that hunter shot timers behave wrongly when a hunter switches between melee and ranged attacks, and said a fix is being worked on, again with no date. On druids, it put the recent 50% rise in the base damage of Wrath in perspective: the difference shows while levelling without spell power, but on a geared character at level 60 it is worth roughly 2% of total damage. Away from the podcast, Aidan Moon wrote on social media that a bug had been making the team's warrior tests wrong and will be fixed, and that players can expect 100% more rage on a critical strike and 50% more off-hand rage from the dual wield talent; Blizzard's written notes had put the critical strike figure at 75%, and beta testers have been arguing over warrior rage since the beta opened. The beta's level cap rises to 30 this week, the beta runs until 21 October, and WoW Forever launches at 23:00 UK time on 4 November, which is midnight on 5 November in Central Europe.