WoW Forever Beta: 8 Hours In, It’s Still Vanilla

After several long streams, including a beta launch that went pretty badly, I finally got to settle in properly on WoW Forever yesterday, live. Eight hours of gameplay testing as much as possible, and getting a better understanding of what Forever really has to offer.

The verdict comes quickly. At the early levels, the WoW Forever beta sticks almost exactly to the original WoW Vanilla, with leveling that’s still slow. Here’s what changed, what stayed the same, and a few tips I picked up while playing that can make your life easier if you’re testing the beta yourself.

Leveling is still pure Vanilla

Even having followed the BlizzCon broadcasts, I didn’t really know what to expect. You had to play it to get a real sense of it.

At these early levels, the feel matches the original. The pacing, the way quests are approached, the time it takes to progress: everything echoes the original leveling experience, long and demanding. I expected shortcuts, adjustments designed for an audience used to modern standards. None of that, at least not yet. The early levels play just like in 2004, with the same deliberate slowness.

Reworked talents that change nothing before level 12

And yet the talents have been reworked in depth. Mutilate makes its comeback. King of the Jungle is back too, along with energy. Berserk arrives for Feral Combat, a talent that didn’t exist before. On paper, these additions make several classes noticeably more powerful, especially at high level.

At low level, it’s a different story. Talents unlock drop by drop: at 12, I only have three points invested. In practice, that changes absolutely nothing compared to the original experience. I even get the feeling some spells were slightly weakened early on, while items, on the other hand, were buffed. The result is that progression stays slow.

To compare spell by spell instead of relying on gut feeling alone, the details are in our WoW Forever Spellbook, which shows the Classic text under every changed spell.

Professions and tents, the real accelerators

Professions got a big boost on the WoW Forever beta, in my opinion. From level 10, you unlock blue items: boots, other crafted pieces that give real survivability and damage bonuses at the early levels. The details of these gains are on our page dedicated to WoW Forever profession bonuses.

There’s also the tent system. I can already pitch one at this stage, and it gives me experience bonuses. When other players come and settle in with you, they can deploy tools that give permanent bonuses. For leveling, that quickly becomes powerful, especially in a group.

Once all this optimization is mastered, you could end up with faster leveling than in the original version, even at the early levels. But that takes a lot of accumulated knowledge, and that’s exactly what this beta is for. There’s really a lot to learn.

Even with all that, leveling is still far from a rush. Blizzard wants to recapture the feeling we had back then. Still, I think they should adjust certain classes, or hand out talent points a bit earlier. With the legacy tree, it should be possible to get some as early as level 5, which would open up the early game a little. That’s one of the things I would have liked to see right from launch. I know the purists won’t agree with me.

Personally, I’m not a big fan of the early levels. I’d rather rush toward a dungeon or a battleground, either works, as long as there are more people around. There are plenty of quests, but for a lot of classes, grinding mobs will probably be faster. The hunter, for example, becomes fearsome from level 11 on. Its pet scales in power like in Season of Discovery, factoring in stats. It hits very hard, very fast.

Prettier, but still a game from another era

Visually, Blizzard has made an effort. If you know WoW Vanilla well, you’ll notice these changes: the textures are sharper, the lighting effects more polished. It’s prettier than back then.

But if you’re hoping for a fully transformed game, some kind of GTA-style remaster, you’re barking up the wrong tree. It’s still an old-school game, with its period graphics. Don’t expect anything mind-blowing on that front. I find the result enjoyable to play all the same.

What struck me most is what retail, the modern version of the game, brought to the interface. Edit mode is really well done. I was able to build my interface easily, and several quality-of-life improvements imported from retail work really well.

The fog: nice-looking, and toggled off with one command

A fog effect is visible pretty much everywhere on the WoW Forever beta. The idea is to give the game a more mysterious look. I haven’t explored every zone, so I don’t know if it’s applied everywhere or just to certain spots. But wherever I saw it, it mainly serves to showcase ray tracing, the realistic calculation of light.

When the sun is out, its light passes through this fog and you can see the rays appear. In some situations, the result looks really beautiful. I think the game looks nicer with this effect, even if it’s maybe a bit too heavy-handed at times.

If you don’t like it, you can turn it off. You then get a clear view that reaches far. And if you want to bring it back to enjoy the visuals, that’s possible too. The command exists in the console. I show it on screen in the video and I put it in the description. A value of 0 removes the effect, a value of 1 restores it.

Map all green? Switch the game to English

If your map shows up entirely green during the WoW Forever beta, the fix is known and quick. Open the options, head to the language section, and switch everything to English. Then close the client and relaunch it. Reloading the UI or switching characters isn’t enough, it really is restarting the game that sets the map straight.

US servers, latency and VPN on the WoW Forever beta

A preferred-language-online system has been announced. On the beta, it isn’t active yet. The goal is to offer servers segmented by language, so French servers. We’d all end up on one big French PvP server. I think that’s a great idea in the long run.

For now, all languages are mixed together. The servers seem to be exclusively US-based, I haven’t found a single European server. The problem showed up as early as day one of the beta, between the queues and the latency. That distance creates network congestion and fairly noticeable lag. Some players work around it with a VPN.

I played last night, I felt some lag, but the situation stabilized pretty quickly. Blizzard has shipped several fixes and it already seems a bit better. Latency is still there: 106 ms at the very least during my session.

Out-of-combat regeneration is much more generous

Another change spotted on the WoW Forever beta: low-level regeneration has been reworked. You need far fewer breaks to recover.

As soon as I leave combat, right after casting my last spell, regeneration kicks in. It’s much more aggressive than before. Even mid-fight, the second I’m no longer engaged, points come back noticeably faster than they used to.

That speeds up leveling a little. But from level 7 or 8 onward, it slows back down. If you play a mana class, you’ll burn through a lot of it. You’ll need to buy drinks and regenerate regularly.

Gear comes from professions, not quests

Right after this video, I’m off to test the first dungeon added to Ironforge. It opens at level 13, and I should reach it during the stream. In theory, you can pick up some really good loot there.

In the starting zones, on the other hand, quests hand out almost nothing but grey items. Loot is rare there. To gear up properly before the first dungeons, you have to go through crafting, which produces green gear as early as level 7.

For the druid, several craftable items bring spell power very early on. I didn’t buy everything for lack of gold, but the potential is there. With the weapon I already have equipped, I’m gaining some. With the full craftable gear set, you can probably push it up to 15 or 20 points.

Armor kits round out the picture. Mine adds stamina and armor, and it applies to four slots: chest, legs, hands and feet. Four upgraded pieces at once isn’t nothing for an early game.

Dual spec, respec and mounts: period pricing

Several people asked me whether dual spec would be in the game. The answer is yes, it’s already showing up in the talent interface, so it will indeed be unlocked. Some players mention level 40, but I can’t confirm that. It might come later, at level 60. I’ll try to find a reliable source on this.

On the respec side, we’re back to period pricing, and it stings. The first one costs 1 gold, but the price climbs very fast after that. Early game, spending 1 gold to fix a talent mistake really hurts. You’re better off planning your talent tree in our calculator before diving in.

If you spot a talent that differs between the calculator and the game, there’s a Discord channel to report it. A screenshot is enough, and it lets us quickly fix a label or a value, especially on the French version.

For mounts, I went and checked the NPCs. Nothing has changed there either.

Step	Level	Cost
First mount	40	100 gold
Fast mount, riding skill included	60	about 1000 gold
First respec	–	1 gold, then rising steeply

WoW Forever is aimed at those who want Vanilla, not a rush

This game is aimed at people looking for an experience close to what existed back then, but enriched. Blizzard has added plenty of dungeons, raids, brand-new content and new lore. My impression is that they want to make it their new flagship product for Classic, a real fresh start.

If you’re looking for fast leveling or express progression, you’re going to be very disappointed. That’s not what Forever is going for, it’s built around slowness and discovery.

To make up your own mind, there’s a little over a month left. Blizzard states on the official WoW Forever page that the beta runs from September 17 to October 21, 2026, ahead of a release date set for November 4.

As for me, I’ve relaunched a guild in the game, with a guild master and officers to keep it running day to day, even during the times when I’ll be less available. I go into more detail about it in the article on relaunching the Kami Labs guild in PvE and PvP. I’m going to cover the WoW Forever beta, then the release, where I’ll play a feral druid to test as much content as possible.

This coverage doesn’t replace anything else. Path of Exile 2 continues, so does Diablo 4, and other MMOs that come out will have their place here too.