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WoW Forever: racial abilities go back on the table
Orcs and trolls have been the obvious Horde picks all through the beta, and the team is now looking at whether the active racials need cutting.
Which race you roll has been one of the loudest arguments of the WoW: Forever beta, because on the Horde side the answer has been the same since the first week: orc or troll. Both carry strong active abilities, and once the numbers are on the table there is little reason to pick anything else if you care about output.
Josh Greenfield said on the podcast that the team will take a proper look at the active racial abilities and then decide whether a cut is needed. He also raised the weapon skill racials, the ones that used to improve your skill with particular weapons and now hand out critical strike or other stats when the matching weapon is equipped. Those may be removed outright by launch, or swapped for something else.
The timing is tight either way. Changes to racials are meant to reach the beta in the coming week, which leaves roughly three weeks of testing before the game opens, enough for players to say whether the new balance is better but not enough for a second rewrite.
Nothing is settled. This is a designer describing what the team intends to look at, reported from the podcast rather than written down by Blizzard, so both the cut and the removal may yet land differently or not at all.
