A character created on December 4 will level through the same quests, dungeons and raids as one from a player who arrived at launch on November 4: the WoW Forever developers say they are trying to avoid any catch-up (a way for latecomers to close the gap). They explain it in an interview published on November 3, 2026 by But Why Tho?, an American game-criticism site, where Mike Nuthals, lead encounter designer, and Tim Jones, lead designer, answer Mick Abrahamson.
The Comeback Kids channel relayed it in a video on November 12, 2026. The Joardee and Vice interviews fill in the picture on raid difficulty and the story.
No catch-up: Tim Jones’s argument
In current WoW, But Why Tho? notes that every mid-season patch brings new ways to catch up on gear, and every season raises the gear baseline. Tim Jones answers that the team is trying to avoid all of that: “When you do that, you just run the risk of diminishing the accomplishments of the person who’s put a lot of effort into doing that. We’re not letting people skip the leveling process. So if we’re not doing that, then why would we allow people to skip a raid tier.” Skipping a tier means reaching recent raids without going through the earlier ones; a tier is the set of raids released with the same patch.
The level cap points the same way: “The level cap’s not moving anywhere.” Tim Jones counts on the player population so that nobody is left alone: “it will be easy for people to find a group that matches your pace and progression.”
The host of The Comeback Kids likes the idea but sets a condition, at 3:06: someone who starts six months later needs “a realistic shot at finding dungeon groups,” or they end up cut off from the older content. That is an opinion, not a measurement: Blizzard publishes no figure on how many groups are available.
Every patch targets all levels, from 30 to 60 and at max level
Content patches come out about every four months, according to the interview. The first raid tier arrives one month after launch: 21 never-before-seen bosses, split between Hyjal Summit and Barrow Deeps, each time with a 10-player raid and a 20-player raid. Our article on Joardee’s interview covers the difficulty of these raids in detail; their opening has been set for December 9 since BlizzCon (our roundup on the first tier).
Tim Jones promises a steady cadence, with “some new avenue of gameplay exploration or character progression for players of all types” in every patch. The full list fits in this table.
| Category | What Tim Jones lists |
|---|---|
| PvP | a new PvP season that comes along with the raid tier |
| Reputation and professions | a new reputation, new crafting recipes, a progression path for a profession that didn’t exist before |
| World | new zones, new quests in existing zones, new mysteries, secrets |
| Dungeons | new dungeons, new level-up dungeons, or new max-level dungeons |
For a second character (an “alt”), Tim Jones promises variety, not catch-up: “If you’re rolling an alt, we want that experience to feel brand new.” Items, sets and profession content remain unknown “even from like level 30 to 60,” and the best-in-slot list (see our BiS List) is meant to be shaken up: “we want to disrupt that every patch.”
Raids tuned to Season of Mastery, not the end of Season of Discovery
Joardee, a creator who asked two developers about raid difficulty in a video from November 6, 2026, gets one of them (the automatic captions do not say which) to admit that the team “maybe pushed the boundary a little too far towards the end of Season of Discovery,” a Classic season that added new content, at 3:48. The speaker cites the expectation of always having world buffs (temporary bonuses obtained outside raids) and of being able to reapply them after every death, as well as trinkets that resurrected players mid-fight (4:00). Conclusion: “we definitely kind of went off the deep end.”
The target is set at 4:33: “a fair amount of our raid encounters will live somewhere in the realm of like the difficulty and complexity of maybe like our season of mastery raids.” Season of Mastery was another Classic season. Our article on world buffs notes that six of the seven Classic world buffs carry, in the client data, a note saying they have no effect inside a raid instance.
| Topic | Remarks | Timestamp |
|---|---|---|
| Scarlet Enclave (Season of Discovery raid), difficulty | “super fun” but “maybe too challenging” | 3:42 |
| Scarlet Enclave, return | “will be really exciting when we can reincorporate it into World of Warcraft Forever down the road” | 4:15 |
No date comes with this promise; the seventh episode of the official podcast points the same way.
Mike Nuthals describes the same restraint for encounters: the first drafts “felt a little more mainline,” with “a lot of moving parts.” The team cut back that complexity so players could “explore their class buttons and have some success in the raid.”
A weekly economy report, and a weekend hotfix if needed
Tim Jones opens the economy chapter with a commitment: “We are committed to making sure that we are paying more attention than we ever have to our economy, and making sure that we enforce fair play where possible.” Tim Jones also announces a firmer position on what the team tolerates (“a much stronger stance”); our article on the economy freeze describes the announced tool against gold buying.
Monitoring runs on reports: “They do economy reports. They communicate with us weekly so that we understand which creatures are generating the most gold. What vendored items are generating the most gold. What creatures are being killed the most, etcetera.” Tim Jones admits that no loophole can be ruled out, but “If I have to come in on a weekend and send a hotfix to nerf a certain unfair spawn or gold farm or something like that, I’ll do it.”
Since the interview, several measures have touched gold and experience, though Blizzard does not tie them to these reports.
| Date | What happened | Read more |
|---|---|---|
| November 8 | Dungeon monster XP goes from 40% to 60% of Classic Era values, for all players. | Levels 30 to 40 |
| November 10 | The vendor resale price of the iron grenade drops by 75% in the hotfix list, according to our reading; Blizzard gives no explanation. | November 11 hotfixes |
| November 13 | A weekly quest in Booty Bay pays 10 to 100 gold through a satchel, with no published rate. | Weekly quest |
| November 17 | The Auction House changes (minimum deposit of 1 copper) are postponed to the weekly maintenance on Tuesday, November 17. | November 11 hotfixes |
Starting in December or March: what the interview says about catch-up
The developers describe no specific measure for latecomers: this table is our reading of their answers on catch-up, with what remains unknown.
| Stage | What the developers say | What remains uncertain |
|---|---|---|
| Leveling 1 to 60 | Nobody skips leveling (Tim Jones). | The actual dungeon speed, which Blizzard considers appropriate and some players still find slow. |
| Finding a group | It will be easy to find one at your pace (Tim Jones). | No figures; The Comeback Kids worries about it, at 3:06. |
| Raids | No tier catch-up: you have to go through the previous one and prepare for it (Joardee, 23:35). | An alt can tag along with a geared team: it all depends on the guild. |
| Gear | No catch-up; the best-in-slot list shifts every patch. | Tiers beyond the first have no dates. |
Our article on Joardee’s interview covers the case of alts in detail. No announced catch-up mechanism lets a player who arrives in March skip a tier: they depend on guilds or groups willing to redo the old content.
A story in slow motion, according to Vice
Vice published an interview on November 6, 2026, by Denny Connolly with Josh Greenfield, senior game designer, and Kris Zierhut, principal game designer. On where the story goes next, Josh Greenfield answers: “we are in our own little time bubble, as we like to call it.” A visit to Outland or Northrend is not ruled out, but “it probably won’t be The Burning Crusade Outland or Wrath of the Lich King Northrend.”
In the meantime, Kris Zierhut says the plan is to go deeper into the story already told, with the threads left aside: “A questline like The Missing Diplomat, for example.” The image used: a novel adapted into a three-hour film, then into a “twelve-episode long mini-series.” Josh Greenfield cites the Ahn’Qiraj war and the Scourge invasion as events to spread over several patches; our article on the official podcast no. 7 covers the same themes.
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