Six scroll buffs that fire off a single keypress. An Orgrimmar bank crammed with potions, elixirs and food. A list of banned items that grows with every rules update. Qualifiers for the $100,000 Forever Open are on October 17 and the final on the 18th, and entrants are already asking whether the title goes to the best dueler or the biggest bags.
Creator HelloJTello, who calls himself a “not pro” player, is signed up for the Forever Open. In his video “Is the WoW Forever Tournament Even Fair?”, he sees a contest of gold and bags where ranged classes start ahead.
Venruki, a longtime figure of WoW PvP and a mage player, is signed up too. He shares the worry about consumables but disputes the rest. The two have already met in the beta, and HelloJTello lost two of three duels against him. Their arguments are weighed here against the official rules, the organizers’ announcements and the press.
The Cdew clip that started the debate
It all starts with a clip HelloJTello plays at the start of his video. In it, Cdew, a well-known PvP player, explains what you have to swallow and apply before every Forever Open duel. To him, it is madness. He hopes scrolls get banned, says he will be annoyed if they are not, and doubts taking part is worth it.
His list: mana, intellect, strength, armor, agility, health, mana regeneration, frost and shadow resistance for three minutes, stamina after a meal. Each effect comes from a different potion, elixir or dish, scrolls not included, and that is for every single duel. He adds his engineering reflectors and “other odds and ends”.
The screenshot shows a participant’s bank in front of the Orgrimmar banker. The slots overflow with scrolls, potions and consumables. A single 
Scroll of Agility II sells for 4 silver to a vendor.
The Forever Open: $50,000 announced, $100,000 the next day
On September 27, 2026, Tips Out announces the first WoW Forever tournament, the Forever Open. He already ran the Classic Duelers League and OTK’s Mak’gora in 2023. Duels are 1v1, with level 30 Horde characters (the tier opened by the October 1 maintenance on the beta). The starting prize pool is $50,000.
The next day, TimTheTatman adds $50,000 and the prize pool doubles. The duels air on Esfand’s and Xaryu’s Twitch channels. Sign-up happens on Raider.IO, with a new Horde character created after 11 a.m. Pacific time on September 27, the surname “Foreverpvp”, the guild <The Forever Open> and a 15 gold fee. Sign-ups close October 2.
Only the top four of each of the 9 classes reach the final, played best-of-five. The winner gets the title “Death’s Duelist” and $50,000. The other $50,000 goes to the best player of each class, $5,555 apiece according to vanilla.games. A full recap is available at Half-Baked Warcraft (Brondulf, September 29, updated October 3). The beta closes October 21 and the game launches November 5.
The turnout figures do not quite match. The organizers announced 4,000 sign-ups on October 1. Venruki talks about more than 3,000 participants and a Swiss format (each round pairs players with similar records), and has no idea how the admins will handle it all.
Ten consumables per duel: the bill
HelloJTello reacted to Cdew’s clip in a post on X. He finds the number of consumables (potions, elixirs, scrolls and other single-use items) you must carry before facing another player absurd. His tweet mentions more than ten consumables per duel, with at least 100 gold just to show up.
HelloJTello’s post sharing Cdew’s clip. Screenshot from the @HelloJTello account, October 2026.
He does not object to the items themselves: WoW has always offered them, and he sees a test of game knowledge in them. What bothers him is the scale, 10 to 34 gold per item, sometimes more. And the real bill runs higher than that math, which ignores the engineering reflectors every participant will use, certain goblin or gnomish engineer gadgets, the ones from world dungeons, and the cheap disposable tricks that can flip a duel.
Venruki confirms the scale of the problem. The amount of consumables expected on game day looks incredible to him, and his first worry is very concrete: room in his bags. He has still gathered everything, thanks to his community’s help and some farming, up to three gear sets. He does not sound particularly optimistic.
The Forever Open rules: what they ban, what they let through
The official rules of the Forever Open, published on Raider.IO, apply a simple logic to consumables (potions, scrolls and other single-use items). Everything is allowed except what sits on a short blacklist.
The blacklist, as it stands in the rules on October 13:
- Non-equippable pet summons, for example
Spider Swarm and the 
Compact Harvest Reaper Kit. Equippable pet-summon items remain legal, such as the 
Dog Whistle. - Control and distraction:
Flash Bomb, 
Magic Dust, Slumber Sand, 
Student Fodder. - Gear:
Truthseeker’s Bow, 
Green Whelp Armor, 
Furbolg Medicine Pouch. - Explosives:
Goblin Sapper Charge. - Protection potions for all six schools, regular and greater:
Fire, 
Nature, 
Frost, 
Arcane, 
Holy, 
Shadow. - Outside buffs: holiday event buffs and consumables (the Wickerman buff, Candy Corn), campfire buffs, and every world or quest buff, such as Blood Shard buffs.
A single banned item found in your bags during an inspection is enough to disqualify you. The text also warns that the list is not fixed: “As WoW:Forever is still an unsolved game, item/consumable bans may be modified at any time.” The site vanilla.games detailed these successive additions on October 7, hence the impression of a list that changes almost daily.
On buffs, only those from your own class are allowed, but nothing stops you from strengthening yourself with items and consumables before the duel. As for scrolls, the rules do not mention them anywhere. They stay legal. The rules also state that a priest may cast Power Word: Shield before the duel, but heals over time cast ahead of it are banned, as is a warlock sacrificing their demon before the fight starts.
Six buffs on a single key
Another point HelloJTello stresses is a trick shown in a Pikaboo clip. It relies on a macro (like the ones in our WoW Forever macros) that uses up the low-level scrolls in one go. One press, and six 30-minute buffs apply at the same time, with no cooldown or delay between uses.
The price of those low-level scrolls will climb in the coming days, he adds, as the technique spreads.
The same idea works very well for a priest. HelloJTello is thinking of playing that class, putting up a 
Mot de pouvoir : Bouclier and then applying all his buffs. With six cheap buffs, he says, nobody will break through his shield.
Melee versus ranged: the two players disagree
HelloJTello starts with the arena. Duels are played in the open, with no pillars to hide behind and no line of sight (LoS) to exploit. With pillars against mages, warlocks and Discipline priests, melee players could drink, eat, drop out of combat and wait for their abilities to come back. In the open, the edge goes to ranged classes.
His favorite example pits a warrior against a mage, a matchup the mage usually wins. Without a 
Free Action Potion, without a 
Goblin Rocket Helmet, without an engineering reflector or frost resistance gear, the warrior has almost no chance. He has nothing against these items, which narrow the power gap, as WoW Classic PvP has always intended. But both sides have access to them: the potion frees the warrior, it frees the mage too, and it rebalances nothing.
The mage has 
Transfert, then waits for his 
Bloc de glace and for his spells to come off cooldown. Only the rogue gets a similar edge, provided he manages to “reset” the fight, which the mage has to let him do. The warlock re-summons his pet mid-duel, a Voidwalker with 
Sacrifice démoniaque or a Felhunter depending on the opponent, and opens up distance with 
Peur. HelloJTello’s verdict is blunt: no melee class stands a chance against a ranged class, even with the best rogue or the best warrior in the world.
One exception worries him, the Enhancement shaman, thanks to the new level 30 weapons. The danger comes less from the weapon itself than from the proc of 
Arme Furie-des-vents. At a 20% chance per hit, the shaman can chain two or three procs in a row and kill his target in a single burst, grenade included. With his totems, he is one of the most dangerous melee fighters at level 30.
On classes, Venruki takes the opposite view. On Twitter, he says, people think mages are too strong. With the allowed consumables, reflectors and Free Action Potions first among them, he still thinks, “unironically,” that the mage will be one of the weakest classes, while adding that he may be wrong. Watching Ziqo chain duels in full gear does not reassure him: for mages, things look grim.
He also distrusts predictions. The warlock, which he thought was the worst class, turned out to be the best. And switching is not obvious: when you have sunk hundreds of hours into a character locked at level 20, you do not change class on the eve of the Forever Open.
The beta, transformed by $100,000
For HelloJTello, those who claim the Forever Open does not weigh on the game are wrong. Players complained about an item during the tournament, and that item was later changed. The mage backs this up too: 
Javelot de glace deals more damage than it should against TBC Classic spell coefficients, and players are already talking about it on Discord because they duel so much. There are no “ifs” or “buts,” he concludes: the tournament’s influence on patches is felt 100%.
Venruki describes the same shift in mood. The beta used to be a relaxed, collaborative exploration. It has become a contest where people demand nerfs against other people’s classes and hide useful bugs. The tournament sends his cortisol through the roof, he admits, and many players have given up on competing. A Reddit post he cites laments seeing gold buying and min-maxing arrive as early as the beta.
He does note one positive effect “nobody talks about.” By optimizing, participants dug through high-level zones and quest chains, and the beta got far better testing than it would have without them. He says he is grateful the tournament exists. For many entrants the sum could change a life. Yet it is being played out on an unbalanced, buggy beta.
Gold, the other leaderboard
HelloJTello agrees with Cdew on the essentials: it all comes down to who owns the biggest bag and the most gold, not who plays best. He understands that logic but admits it casts a shadow over the Forever Open. Three things annoy him: RMT (buying and selling gold for real money), the controversies around big streamers suspected of getting gold as gifts, and the pile-up of consumables. Venruki admits he does not know how widespread gold buying is.
The debate rests on facts, though. PC Games reports that after the prize pool rose to $100,000, participants received large sums of gold from level 1 characters on the beta. A clip shows one of them giving 380 gold to PvP streamer Ziqo, who is signed up for the tournament and denies buying anything. Blizzard took the gold back without announcing any ban.
Sebastian Glanzer, PC Games, September 29, 2026: “WoW Forever: Massive Erhöhung des PvP-Preispools sorgt für Goldkauf-Debatte” (the massive increase of the PvP prize pool fuels the gold-buying debate).
Community manager Kaivax then wrote on the official US forum that gold buyers would be sanctioned, in beta and after launch. According to MassivelyOP, Blizzard had closed more than 2,100 buyer accounts and nearly 1,600 seller or bot accounts as of October 9. A dedicated article covers this WoW Forever gold-buying affair.
Ways to fix the Forever Open
HelloJTello wants fewer consumables and the return of line of sight and pillars, which would give melee a real chance to survive. He hopes the rules get revised by the following week, to give participants more equal chances and spare them the feeling that they need every last item in the game.
Venruki relays an idea from Supatease: cap each player at a few bags of consumables. Another proposal circulating is food and water only. He himself suggests limiting everyone to one or two gear sets.
At the time of writing, no announcement from the organizers goes in that direction. They have not confirmed either whether duels will get real line of sight. If the arena stays open, HelloJTello sees few classes able to beat a well-played warlock or mage.
A bit of luck, and a tournament that barely concerns anyone
Venruki compares level 30 dueling to “rock-paper-scissors”: preparation, talent and a lot of luck, which the Swiss-format draw amplifies. That is the charm of Classic dueling, he says. The problem is putting such a serious tournament, with so much money, on a level 30 beta with spells that are too strong or too weak. His own chances will hinge on Frostbite procs and on the spells his opponents resist.
HelloJTello puts entrants at 5% or less of the community: the rest are not even playing the beta and will show up at launch. Venruki talks about 99.9% of players being unaffected, and on the Alliance side, he says, you never meet a single participant. In his eyes, “the tournament only ruined the beta if you let it,” since you can ignore the streamers and the tournament.
He will take part anyway, fully prepared. He has loved Classic dueling forever and the tournament makes good stream content, but this ultra-competitive mode wears him out: “I’m not built for this kind of sweat,” it is a bit too much for an old dad like him. He will slow down after launch and will be relieved when it is all over.
On the evening of October 18, one player will walk away with $50,000. The others, Venruki first among them, are mostly waiting for November 5.
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