WoW Forever leveling: I Changed My Mind in One Day

In what I wrote yesterday after eight hours of play, I judged WoW Forever leveling to be slow, very close to the original Vanilla. Second day of the beta, and here I am at level 19, having gone through almost all of the base content. My opinion has changed, especially about the pace of progression.

Two things explain this change of heart about WoW Forever leveling. The new dungeon system changes the pace of leveling up. The crafting gear and sets added to the game carry a lot of weight too. I’m standing in front of the entrance to Redridge Mountains, a zone packed with recipes you can access very early. Some of them are massive.

Crafting Crates, the New Addition You Shouldn’t Throw Away

For these new crafting recipes, Blizzard added crates to fill. Every profession has its own, and you really shouldn’t throw them away. I think they’re going to gain value: nothing stops you from trading them, or buying them directly at the auction house.

There’s no need to check off every line requested. One is enough to fill the crate. Once you have the items you need in your bags, you slot them in with a single click from your inventory. All that’s left is to bring the full crate back to the right NPC. In front of the Redridge Mountains, the mission asked for 10 suffocating devices. Once you’ve gathered all 10, the crate is complete.

The NPC then trades those crates for points, and those points can in turn be exchanged for patterns. The enchanting ones stood out to me the most. Other professions offer patterns that are just as interesting for a first purchase. Being among the first to unlock certain enchants opens up a real opportunity: reselling them at the auction house can pay off big. It’s up to you to decide which one to buy first, depending on what you plan to do with it.

Enchants Are on Another Level

The first weapon enchant I test heals 5% of my maximum health on every parry or dodge. As a tank, that happens a lot. The limit is once every 10 seconds.

Another effect, called Revelation, is even stronger. On a hit that doesn’t crit, it can trigger and increase your next spell’s critical strike chance by 200%. On a mage who gets this proc, the effect becomes enormous. It all depends on the proc rate, but the potential is real.

The game also offers on-hit enchants. At this level, you can enchant a lot of gear: healing, spell power, agility, defense, strength. Forever opens up a level of customization and optimization the original Classic never had. Many of the gaps in the old system have been filled.

The chest enchant struck me as absurd. A 25% chance on every hit taken, a shield that absorbs 50 points, once every 5 seconds. You get it early in the game, which makes it even stronger for tanking.

It needs to be nuanced depending on the class. For the paladin, this enchant is excellent. For the warrior or the druid, who need to generate rage, it’s less so. We tested it in game: an active shield blocks rage generation, just like in the original Classic. In PvP, on a feral druid or a rogue, the shield procs remain very useful for absorbing damage. At very high level, the value drops off.

Enchant	Effect	Limit
Weapon, on parry or dodge	Heals 5% of maximum health	Once every 10 s
Revelation	+200% critical strike chance on next spell	On a non-critical hit
Chest	Shield that absorbs 50 points	25% per hit taken, once every 5 s

At max level, an enchant climbs to 65 spell power. The healing power equivalent is around 100. Librams follow the same precise logic: Holy Light gains 0.2 seconds of cast time, Rip lasts 2 seconds longer, and a shaman totem sees its cooldown reduced. In PvP, that last effect is particularly powerful.

Alchemy and Engineering: Potions That Deal Damage

Alchemists get an impressive amount of new components. For example, I found an elixir that gives 400 health. That’s almost the equivalent of a flask, except it stacks with a flask. The high-level version goes further: 400 health and 500 armor for 30 minutes.

In the original Classic, engineering was the profession that carried consumable damage. Sappers, charges, and grenades were used to optimize a raid or attempt a speedrun. This time, several professions bring their own damage source, and alchemy is far from the least generous. I have a potion that triggers something like a fire breath: 400 instant damage, then 125 damage every 2 seconds for 8 seconds. And that’s not even the strongest one.

There’s a toxic cloud potion. It drops a zone on the ground for 12 seconds and deals between 285 and 315 nature damage per second, at level 45, with 265 Alchemy skill. I think that’s the most brutal area damage I’ve seen from that kind of use. The new elixirs follow the same logic: strength, agility, crit, spirit. You end up with an optimization that feels like WotLK or TBC, with potions built for a short burst, popped right before the pull.

On the engineering side, the new grenades hit harder than the ones we already knew. There’s also a glider, the one from Mists of Pandaria I believe, which should be fearsome in PvP. A trinket turns you into a chicken, a cape makes you invisible, and there’s still a lot to discover. Engineering hasn’t impressed me so far. It was already strong to begin with, and the other professions got a huge amount on their side too. I think it’ll stay very solid in PvP, especially for the grenades.

Crafting Produces Broken Gear for WoW Forever Leveling

Crafting touches everything: blacksmithing, leatherworking, tailoring. There are pages and pages of recipes. The general idea is enough: you can craft absolutely ridiculous items. My only question is how fast you can gather the components needed for these trades, because those pieces are bind on pickup, not bind on equip. You can’t sell them at the auction house. They only serve your own progression.

I’ve picked up two of them so far, from natural loot. I wonder how easy they are to get, even if you might eventually be able to buy them at the auction house. These pieces are highly sought after, so I think Blizzard will need to raise the drop rates. They’ll need to find the right balance for the system to stay useful for WoW Forever leveling.

If that balance is found, crafting lets you break some pretty crazy things. You find items with four stat lines as early as level 25, which is disproportionate for this stage of the game. To give you an idea: some of them come close to the spell power of Molten Core pieces. Yesterday I looted the Deadmines staff, a blue staff that shows as many stats, and even more spell power, than a Staff of Jordan. And that one is epic, meant for level 40.

WoW Forever Leveling: the Real Turnaround

Yesterday, I said WoW Forever leveling was slow, pure Vanilla. I stand by that judgment for the first twelve levels. Those are rough. You have very few items, and you need to get into crafting right away to make progress.

Thanks to the items you get from crafting or in dungeons, I can already feel the difference. I have almost no talents unlocked, and yet the gap shows on my stats and my survivability. The genuinely heavy-hitting spells and talents arrive at levels 30 and 40.

Once you get past that first twelve-level hurdle, everything changes. Once the first dungeon is done, solo farming speed climbs noticeably. Quests give around 500 experience points around levels 10 to 12, and close to 1000 points at level 20. The old Vanilla-style leveling only dominates at this base level of the game. As soon as you touch the new content, experience gains take off.

On my druid tank, before I got any gear, every monster took fifteen to twenty seconds to kill in bear form. Some fights dragged on forever. With the new items, everything flows much better. Swipe unlocks at level 16 and finally opens up area farming.

Even so, the druid remains one of the least efficient classes for this. The paladin does much better, and the mage even more so. Blizzard may have nerfed the Blizzard spell, but a mage still has a simple solution. A Frost Nova, one or two area-of-effect casts, and packs of monsters drop all at once.

Blizzard might raise monster health further down the line. Otherwise everything dies in one hit, and area farming loses its point. But for a lot of classes, this mechanic is going to come back in force and speed up WoW Forever leveling. For the druid at least, the overall feel becomes much more enjoyable.

Reworked Dungeons: XP Comes From Quests, Not Monsters

WoW Forever leveling also speeds up thanks to dungeons. Blizzard reworked them from the ground up, and it’s surprising at first: the XP you used to get from killing monsters inside has been removed.

I went back there last night to finish some pending quests. It was my second visit to the Ruins of Lordaeron. The entrance sits just to the left of Undercity’s, impossible to miss. On the Alliance side, expect to die once or twice before you get there. This dungeon also rewards legacy points, which is a good reason to run it.

With no XP from monsters, you have to optimize your route. A bit like Mythic Plus in the current game: no monster quota to clear, you push straight for the bosses and the objectives. Trash mobs give neither XP nor interesting loot, so you might as well skip them.

Bosses, on the other hand, drop much stronger loot than in the original Classic. That’s true for the old instances as well as the new ones. Most of the blue items that drop from bosses are extremely strong.

Each dungeon offers between two and four quests. For the Deadmines for example, it’s better to do the VanCleef chain before going in. Otherwise, you’ll have to run the dungeon again for nothing.

These quests give a huge amount of XP. On the early dungeons, at low levels, a single one earned me almost a level and a half. The higher you go, the more it drops off.

Level range	XP per dungeon quest
Low level, first dungeons	about 1.5 levels per quest
Higher levels	50 to 60% of a level per quest

With a good group and a planned route, a single run can earn you three to five levels. Enough to unlock the next levels and new quests all at once.

No more farming the same dungeon twenty or thirty times in a row because it was the most profitable. That was the meta back then, and I did it too, but it wasn’t really exciting. The new system pushes you to switch between dungeons while staying just as efficient for XP.

Blizzard’s goal seems to be preventing boosting. I have my doubts. High-level players will still be able to offer to clear all your quests in two minutes for gold. The method might change, but putting an end to it looks complicated.

Transportation Makes the Map Actually Usable

In Classic, mobility was always a problem. More than once I found myself stuck in one region, with no way to reach my friends who had gone elsewhere. That bottleneck killed the pace of group sessions.

In WoW Forever, Blizzard rethought the transportation system. The Auberdine boat is the best example. It no longer offers a single destination, but three separate routes.

From the dock, straight ahead, you head to Stormwind. To the left, you end up on the other side of the map, at Menethil Harbor. Two routes, two opposite directions, one boat. And the trip doesn’t stop there: if you stay on board, the route continues and opens up access to other instances further on. Along the way, you pass by Dalaran.

This expanded network changes the pace of the game. Dungeons become accessible without an endless detour. In 10 to 15 minutes, you cross the entire map. On the roleplay and immersion side, this kind of trip adds a lot.

Graphics, the French Map, and New Sets

The visual effects deserve a word of their own. At different times of day, light rays start appearing, and some shots are genuinely beautiful. Underwater too, while swimming, the effects multiply.

It’s reminiscent of the shader system on Minecraft. You have the base version, then you install shaders, and the game becomes noticeably prettier. This graphical overhaul pleasantly surprised me. The vanilla spirit of the original game is preserved, with polished lighting effects on top.

Another topic: the map bug. The French-language map was displaying entirely in green, which made the game unplayable. An addon fixes the problem on the beta, and I’m putting the link in the video description. Blizzard might fix it on their end eventually.

The new sets are also worth checking out. In the Deadmines, I picked up a piece with never-before-seen effects. The bonuses have changed. This one gives your melee attacks a 5% chance, when you hit someone from behind, to deal extra damage: 70 to 80 physical damage spread over 5 seconds. There’s still a lot of set bonuses left to discover. At high level as well as low level, for twinks or for leveling, sets are going to become a lot more interesting to collect.

A word on frame rate, in case you’re running into issues. Here, I’m getting 56 FPS, with 30 to 40 players in the zone. The beta is being flooded. For now, the fix stays simple: a /reload, a disconnect and reconnect, and that usually helps.

The Site’s Tools: Talents, Spellbook, and Guild Directory

On kami-labs.fr, I’ve already updated the talent trees. The talent calculator now shows the original Classic version under every changed talent, so you can spot the difference at a glance. I’ve also made the icons bigger to make them easier to read. By logging in, you save your configurations and reload the builds you’re already working on.

I’ve also added the Spellbook. There, for every class, you’ll find the spells you learn in WoW Forever, including the new talents. The warrior, for example, gets Tactical Mastery as a base ability, along with Drunk with Victory. A filter lets you show only the spells changed for a given specialization.

The Classic version appears under every spell. Sometimes only the wording changes, the overall effect stays the same, and the rewrite just clarifies the text. Sometimes it’s a real value change: Thunder Clap goes from a 10% to a 20% increase in time between attacks. I’m working on a dedicated video about the new spells and talents, the topic is too dense to fit in here.

Finally, the guild directory stays online. Our guild, Dream Legacy, is listed there. You can publish your own guild project there and give it visibility, so the site benefits everyone.

A Compromise Between the Original Classic and Blizzard’s Additions

To sum up, WoW Forever will be a compromise between the original Classic, with its atmosphere and its rediscoveries, and a mass of additions Blizzard has made to its own game. I think we’ll rediscover everything a little, especially in high-level dungeons and raids, even though the old dungeons will come back. It should speak to a lot of players who’ll find some of that old-school feeling again. This blend changes the way you approach progression, it’s not just a simple step backward.

WoW Forever leveling will be far less painful than I feared. The power brought by gear and the new talents mechanically speeds things up a lot. And I’m not even counting the legacy tree I talked about yesterday. It gives huge bonuses: talents unlocked earlier, extra XP bonuses, all the knowledge accumulated once you reach level 60, and the ability to send gear bought at the auction house to your alts. These advantages stack from one character to the next, which changes the way you chain leveling across multiple classes.

That was my main worry going into this beta. It’s largely gone now. The window is short, so might as well make the most of it and test several WoW Forever leveling routes before launch. Blizzard states on the official page that the beta runs until October 21, 2026, with a release date set for November 4.