WoW: Forever Boosts Every Class Power in Last-Minute Change

Blizzard has detailed a final round of fixes and balance changes that it’s making to World of Warcraft: Forever, based on feedback from the recent beta, before the retro MMO launches this week. The headline change is both simple and pretty dramatic: every class will do more damage.

In patch notes published on the official WoW forums, the developers explained that they had realized that sticking to the original game’s power budgets for each class “meant that every new element we added needed to come at the expense of something else. Those reductions left some iconic abilities feeling lackluster, and closed the door to other potentially exciting design options.”

The solution, Blizzard has decided, is to raise damage across every class and increase the health of high-level creatures to compensate. “This additional ‘headroom’ has allowed us to tune things to a place that we hope feels better overall,” the developers said.

Blizzard fine-tunes classes and more before WoW: Forever’s launch

The patch notes also include a raft of tuning for a wide range of classes and specs, which Blizzard said was aimed at distinguishing Forever‘s changes to classic WoW from those made in early expansions The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King. “Our aim in class design is not perfect numerical equality, but rather for every class to feel valuable to the groups they join, with powerful, unforgettable moments brought on by mastering them,” Blizzard said.

The developer said that it would now leave balance alone until Forever‘s raids open a month after launch, on Dec. 9. Then it will make a “large tuning pass” based on data gathered from the live game, including on players leveling past 30 (the level cap in the beta).

Other changes in the patch notes include increased creature respawn rates in lower-level zones, to support the “large player volumes” Blizzard expects at launch, and a huge update to WoW: Forever‘s official gamepad support, which Blizzard reckons has now “entered a complete functional state” in which “all major gameplay and core user interface experiences can be played with a controller.”

World of Warcraft: Forever, a reimagined version of classic WoW as it was in 2004 with updates and new content, launches on Nov. 4 (or Nov. 5, depending on your time zone). If the beta is any indication, it’s going to be extremely popular.