WoW Forever Recap: Records, Wands and Scaling Thorns

Hey everyone, it’s time for the weekly WoW Forever debrief. A lot has happened since the beta launched, and I wanted to gather here everything I’ve watched, read and experienced these past few days. If you’re not subscribed to the channel yet, now’s the time, I’m publishing this kind of recap every week for as long as Forever coverage stays relevant.

On the menu today: the viewership numbers, the reasons behind the hype, how solid the servers have been, and a look at everything coming on the class and content side.

WoW Forever is breaking viewership records

WoW Forever just broke new viewership records, especially on Twitch. There’s no precise figure for the number of players logged in during the beta, but it must be running at huge levels. The queues at launch were endless, and there are people everywhere on the servers, even with several layers active in parallel.

To give you an idea of the scale, WoW Forever’s announcement at BlizzCon had already been a massive hit, peaking at 807,000 viewers. I wrote a full article on those numbers: 807,000 viewers during the beta. The beta launch itself brought together around 600,000 concurrent viewers.

For comparison, the launch of WoW Classic had gathered over 1.1 million viewers on Twitch back then. So we’re still below that historic record for now, but this is a beta, not the official release. It remains to be seen what the November 4 launch will bring, and it’s already shaping up to be huge for Blizzard.

Why all this hype

A question keeps coming up in the comments: why is this classic version generating so much excitement, way more than Season of Discovery did back in its time? I think it’s a convergence of several factors, not a single isolated event.

First there was the official announcement at BlizzCon, preceded by months of leaks and teasers around a possible Camelot or a WoW 2. All those rumors kept people talking for a long time. At the same time, lawsuits led to the shutdown of iconic private servers like Turtle WoW or Ascension, which already gathered huge numbers of players.

Those players without a server are naturally looking for a new home. Blizzard is offering them a modified classic here, in the spirit of Turtle WoW, but official this time. No more fear of a sudden shutdown, which changes the way people plan for the long term. And Blizzard has put in far more resources than on the last classic iterations.

A solid netcode and mass PvP

It really shows in the technical progress. The netcode (the network code that syncs players with the server) has made a huge leap forward. Several big PvP events have already been organized by ASM Gold, Savix, Xariu and others, and the servers handled the load pretty well.

There are still a few micro-lags, pushed to the extreme in a packed capital city. But raids stayed stable and smooth despite a lot of PvP and simultaneous players, with numbers well above what we saw during Season of Discovery. I covered it in detail here: hundreds of players and almost no lag.

For open-world PvP and outdoor events, it’s shaping up to be exceptional. We’ve never seen anything like it, not on WoW and not on other recent MMOs, all of which tried mass PvP without really pulling it off, often with catastrophic FPS performance or lag. WoW remains a graphically lightweight game, even if the beta still has some visibly temporary FPS issues. Our current graphics cards run it effortlessly, a real asset for organizing PvP events in a world that keeps a great atmosphere.

New classes, raids and dungeons

All the announced new features are drawing huge crowds. The class changes are part of that: I recently covered them in a dedicated video series, almost finished now, and these changes shake up the meta quite a bit. Classes and specs that used to be unplayable are finally becoming viable again.

There are also all the new raids, the new dungeons, and the big changes made to professions and crafting. Not to mention everything still left to discover before release. With all of that combined, we can expect a real flood of players at the official launch.

Wands scale with spell power

Another discovery on WoW Forever: wands now scale with spell power. I came across a video from YouTuber Scriblet, showing that with spell-power-oriented gear, he was directly boosting his wand damage.

At level 20, with really good gear stacked with spell power, he deals real damage with just his wand. Crits of 152, to the point where mobs at his level (level 18) get destroyed by the wand alone. He had obviously leveled up his wand skill in parallel. Mages also have two talent points in Arcane SP, which specifically boost wand damage.

These are really interesting discoveries. Wands are going to become much more effective overall, and this could even become a way to regen mana in the endgame while still keeping some DPS going. That was already a bit true back in the day, you’d squeeze out some DPS with the wand, but now we’re talking about the wand that scales with spell power and is starting to hit really hard.

So if you’re playing a caster, don’t underestimate your wand. Enchanting also lets you craft them, and with the new recipes, that profession has become extremely powerful on WoW Forever.

The XP sleeping bag makes a comeback

The Season of Discovery sleeping bag makes a welcome comeback, with a 3% XP bonus you can basically activate at will. I put the full quest to get it in the video description, it’s the exact same guide already shared for Season of Discovery: the different steps, the coordinates of the NPCs involved, and the command for those using in-game location add-ons.

3% might seem trivial on its own. But combined with the new food bonuses, which go up to 5%, that’s 8% total XP bonus. On continuous leveling, that’s always nice to have.

Druid Thorns scale too

In the same vein, the druid’s Thorns scale well with spell power, and the result is pretty good. Right now on Forever, the druid scales with spell power to the point where Thorns becomes their second damage source, sometimes even their first if you pull several mobs onto you in bear form.

According to tests shared by the community, with enough spell power, a rogue kills themselves on your Thorns before they can kill you, even at level 20. This is also potentially the best way to tank in a dungeon: you deal far more damage than the bear’s AoE attack, which hits for around 16 on a non-critical hit, while Thorns ticks climb way higher.

The catch is that right now you can gear up with spell power, apply the Thorns buff, then switch back to your normal tank gear while keeping the boosted damage. This is probably not intended. We’ll see if Blizzard fixes it, but as it stands, it’s extremely powerful, almost mandatory for tanks. Picking up spell power gear and buffing up before a group or a dungeon is becoming a real priority.

Still, since Blizzard has announced dynamic spells, I’d be surprised if this stays as it is much longer.

My prediction on PvP and resilience

On the PvP side, resilience hasn’t been confirmed or announced by Blizzard. There will very likely be no resilience gear in WoW Forever.

A quick useful reminder. During Season of Discovery, a resilience system was built directly into the game. It activated as soon as you engaged a player in open-world PvP, and it stayed active everywhere in battlegrounds.

The numbers give an idea of how impactful it was. At launch, physical damage was reduced by 20%, magic damage by 30%, and healing received by 20% for 10 seconds. That percentage climbed patch after patch, reaching -50% on physical damage and -60% on magic damage by March 20, 2025.

Without an equivalent system on WoW Forever, everyone is going to get one-shot, whether it’s casters or rogues ambushing mages, for values far above the health pool of cloth classes.

For now, there’s no confirmation from Blizzard on this. But I wouldn’t be surprised if they added a system similar to Season of Discovery’s on WoW Forever.

New dungeons and guilds to find on the site

I keep adding articles about WoW Forever’s new features on kami-labs.fr, the links are in the video description.

The newly added dungeons are now detailed in every article. You’ll find the different bosses that make up the dungeon, as well as the loot dropped by each of them.

Some information might still be missing. The data is being updated progressively, partly thanks to feedback shared on Discord.

Lots of guilds have also started publishing their profiles. So you can find plenty of guilds to apply to directly on kami-labs.fr, and my own guild is still recruiting for both PvE and PvP. Just click on a profile and apply to the one you like.

That’s it for this quick WoW Forever news update. See you soon.