WoW Forever: gear is built for a bag of tricks, not one best item

Blizzard wants WoW Forever players to collect gear for different situations rather than chase one best item per slot. Principal game designer Kris Zierhut and senior game designer Josh Greenfield explained the idea in an interview about horizontal and vertical progression, published on 5 November.

Zierhut said the team is making items a lot more varied. Some have bonuses against a specific creature type, some work best in specific environments, and some suit particular mechanics. A well-developed character should end up with a bag of tricks: two trinkets for one boss, a different helm in another raid.

That is also meant to give old loot a second life. A raid item that looks dull and goes into the bank may turn out to be the perfect answer for a boss in the next raid, because of its setting or the type of creature. Zierhut added that a new player without a wide collection is not at a huge disadvantage, they just cannot fully optimise.

Character power still climbs, but more slowly than it did in Classic. Greenfield called incremental power gain part of the core of the game, while Zierhut said levelled items should grow more slowly and few of them will be perfectly optimised. The wider idea was covered earlier in how Blizzard defines horizontal progression.

The legacy system is the other path. Zierhut said players who level every class, learn every profession and explore the world can unlock rewards that a raider focused on one character does not get, giving a hard-to-get spectral bear mount as an example. Greenfield said the team does not want to bloat collections just to add a treadmill, but will add more to chase where it makes sense, including for PvP players.