On December 9, a WoW Forever guild will have no menu to pick from at the door of the first raid: no normal mode, no heroic mode, a single version of each boss. The detail comes from Joardee, a creator who interviewed Josh Greenfield and Tim Jones, whom Joardee introduces as two of the game’s lead developers, in a video of 31 minutes 30 seconds posted on November 6, 2026. The subtitles are automatic and do not say who is speaking: we write “the team”.
Our article on Crix’s interview already covers the Tier 1 set spread over three raids, the uniform item level, the lighter buffs and the targeted difficulty. Joardee’s video goes further, and the raid passages of MrGM’s interview from the same day complete it; our article on that interview covers the rest.
One version of each boss, from groups of friends to top guilds
Joardee asks whether the ambitious content will take the form of hard modes or secret bosses. The team admits hidden bosses and secret phases in raids, then draws the line at 9:55: “it is one difficulty for the piece of content that you’re doing”. The team likes the old hard modes, but they mark “the beginning of splitting groups” into normal and heroic. It prefers what it loved in Vanilla and The Burning Crusade, at 10:21: “Everyone is competing in the same instance. Everyone is fighting the same version of the same bosses”. Extra difficulty is something players give themselves: doing it with fewer people, doing it faster.
The 10, 20 and 40-player raids serve the same purpose: a casual guild and a heavily invested guild face the same encounter, and several teams from one guild can join forces. At 11:40, the team rules out the idea of a ten-boss, 40-player raid: they will rather be single-boss raids, “kind of beer league stuff”. On Onyxia, it plans clearly more loot than for a 20-player raid boss (“double maybe”, at 12:39) and says it does not tune the encounter to forbid killing her with 30 or 35 players (13:14).
| Topic | What the team says | Timestamp |
|---|---|---|
| Difficulty | Only one per piece of content, no normal and heroic modes. | 9:55 |
| Secret bosses | Hidden bosses and secret phases possible, within the design principles. | 9:46 |
| Average guild progression | “Two to three weeks”; some guilds will finish in the first. | 7:43 |
| Ten-boss 40-player raid | “That’s not going to happen”; rather single-boss raids. | 11:40 |
| Raid launch | Global, same day everywhere. MrGM mentions December 9; the developers do not confirm it in the exchange. | 14:19 |
Restricted addons, threat is back, fights that last
In MrGM’s interview, the question is about addons (interface extensions) during boss fights. The team answers that a large part of their functions is restricted in combat (“a lot of it’s restricted in lockdown”), then explains its reasoning at 15:28: when addons do more, encounters must do more to stay hard, hence “this arms race”. By restricting them, it keeps fights “where you don’t need the add-on”. Joardee gets the same line at 5:19: mechanics must be readable through rhythm, sound and visual cues, without an addon.
The intended spirit is called “beer and pretzels”: relaxed raiding among friends, with serious preparation. The level is specified at 17:34: “the typical Naxxramas encounter, not the hard ones”, so harder than Molten Core, judged “a little too easy”, but not at the level of the Four Horsemen. Fights rushed in 45 seconds, common in Classic in 2019, will become the exception: “not going to be super common” (18:06). Another habit to relearn: threat, meaning the attention of monsters, which classes will have to watch again so as not to pull enemies away from the tank.
| Topic | What the team says (MrGM) | Timestamp |
|---|---|---|
| Addons | Restricted in “lockdown” to avoid the race between addons and encounters. | 15:00 |
| Threat | Something to manage; some players have lost the habit of not stealing the tank’s attention. | 16:50 |
| Boss difficulty | Above Molten Core, below the Four Horsemen. | 17:34 |
| Fight length | The 45-second fights of 2019: “not going to be super common”. | 18:06 |
| Barrow Deeps | Compared to Karazhan, the 10-player raid of The Burning Crusade: in week 1, no random group without preparation; after a few weeks or months, playable that way. | 18:37 |
Loot unknown until the first kill, and old raids to run again
Items from upcoming dungeons and raids are not in the game files. In MrGM’s interview, the team explains that a flag keeps the item out “of the client database until somebody gets it”. It plans to do this again for every new dungeon and raid, out of a taste for “the unsolved game”: nobody knows what the best gear is before seeing the loot.
In Joardee’s video, the topic is loot worth running again. At 15:11, the team rejects a perfectly flat item level progression: “there will be some sort of upward slope”. It sees guilds going back to old raids for specific pieces, as in Vanilla and The Burning Crusade: the Onslaught Girdle in Molten Core, the Dragonspine Trophy from Gruul. MrGM hears the same thing at 29:05: each boss has a low chance of dropping “chase items”, rare pieces players go after, some of which have “a higher item level”.
These items are spread over several bosses and several rarities (18:23). A developer adds that an item may drop for nobody in the first week: “week two or three” before it is seen, even if many guilds will see everything early. Raids are not corridors: Hyjal Summit has several wings, and you can aim for one boss without clearing everything (17:00). Shortcuts, such as a teleporter, are being considered “in future patches”, but not while the tier is current (17:36).
A legendary staff for healers is mentioned “a couple of patches in”, then the exchange turns into a joke, with nothing confirmed (16:01). MrGM comes back to it at 30:18, mentioning a legendary staff “revealed” the day before. Neither names the item; Blizzard had shown Taldramir, the game’s first legendary, shortly before.
Alts will have to redo the climb, tier by tier
An alt is a second character. Joardee asks at 22:57 whether a new rogue will be able to go get their daggers in the most recent raid. The team answers in the conditional: the difficulty of the current tier requires everyone to really contribute. If the whole group wears the tier’s best gear, a few alts can tag along to pick up pieces (“freeloaders”). But “we’ve tuned encounters in such a way where it requires people to go through the previous tier and be reasonably prepared” (23:35).
The argument is the slope: if gear does not progress enough between pre-BiS (the best gear before raids), Tier 1 and Tier 2, the team cannot make encounters harder (23:48). It also wants the required damage and healing numbers to go up. As for tricks, the team has no objection to players who bend the game with consumables, kiting (pulling monsters while backing away) or Feign Death to get past monsters (25:49), while still wanting fair boss fights. Items, for their part, must have texture: effects tied to a biome or a creature type, still useful months later (28:50).
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