1,200 questions for Blizzard: what WoW Forever players want answered in the live Q&A

Blizzard’s live World of Warcraft Q&A goes out on Thursday, September 17: the modern WoW segment starts at 10:00 a.m. PDT and the WoW Forever segment follows at 10:30 a.m. PDT (17:30 UTC, 19:30 CEST) on the official Warcraft Twitch and YouTube channels. Ahead of the stream, community manager Kaivax opened a question thread on the official forums on reveal day, September 12.

In four days it collected 1,213 replies from about 950 different players, nearly 12,000 views and more than 3,700 likes. We read all of them. Below is what the community asked most, ranked by how often a topic came up and how many likes those posts earned. Blizzard has not said which questions it picked, so treat this as a map of what players care about, not a preview of the answers.

The most-liked questions in the thread

1. Will Forever get an RP-PvP ruleset? (88 likes, the top post in the thread)
2. What happens to progressive Classic realms like Mists of Pandaria Classic? (58 likes)
3. Will Forever PvP give arena players a long-term reason to stay? (53 likes)
4. Will Forever include flex raiding, or cross-faction raids? (50 likes)
5. Will modern WoW return to faction-specific stories? (49 likes)
6. When do older races get more character customization? (46 likes)
7. Will Forever use Midnight’s addon API restrictions or the open Classic API? (44 likes)

RP-PvP: the loudest single request

No topic was repeated as often by as many different people. More than 50 posts ask for a roleplay PvP ruleset in WoW Forever, many of them pointing to Grobbulus, the Classic 2019 RP-PvP realm, as proof the audience exists. Several players add a practical worry: if the option only arrives after launch, anyone who wants it would have to restart characters they levelled on another ruleset. Related follow-ups ask whether players can switch ruleset after character creation and whether groups can mix rulesets for instanced content.

What happens to Classic progression?

The second big theme has nothing to do with Forever’s own features. Around 30 posts, with more than 300 likes between them, ask what the new game means for Mists of Pandaria Classic and the progression realms that started in 2019. Players want to know whether MoP Classic continues into Warlords of Draenor or Legion, whether those characters can ever move to Forever or retail, and why the topic was not addressed at BlizzCon. One reply sums up the mood: some guilds have spent seven years on those characters and are unsure whether to keep playing.

Skyborne, race and class combinations

The paid Skyborne race came up in more than 70 posts. The most-liked version (40 likes) asks two things: will premium races come to retail too, and if Skyborne racials turn out stronger than existing ones, how does Blizzard avoid pay-to-win complaints? Others ask whether Skyborne and any future Forever-only races will ever be playable in modern WoW. For background, see our pieces on the $29.99 price backlash and Blizzard’s reasoning for another elf race.

Race and class restrictions are a related sore point, with over 100 posts. Players welcome the new Undead, Troll and Night Elf paladins in patch 12.2 but ask why other races were left out, and one post speaking for the gnome community asks whether gnomes will be able to play priests in Forever. Ogres as a playable race also appear more than once.

How Forever itself will work

The questions aimed squarely at WoW Forever’s design are the ones most useful for planning a character:

• Raid sizes: smaller guilds ask for flex raiding because 20- and 40-player raids are hard to fill, and whether cross-faction raiding will be allowed.
• Addons: will Forever follow Midnight’s tighter addon API or Classic’s open one, or land somewhere in between?
• Realms and layering: does Forever keep a single shared world per realm, or use retail-style sharding? Oceanic players ask whether they will still play on Sydney-hosted servers now that Forever is realmless.
• Levelling with friends: with level scaling gone, one player asks for level sync so max-level characters can help friends without simply carrying them.
• PvP longevity: arena players want rating and competition that reward skill, not only time played, and some bring up the old rank 14 honor system.
• Shaman tanks: around 25 posts point to Season of Discovery and the newly shown Forever shaman talents and ask for an official tank role.
• Bots and the economy: how Blizzard plans to stop bots farming and distorting auction house prices.

Retail questions in the mix

The thread covers modern WoW too. Character customization drew around 60 posts, asking for new hairstyles and options for older races and changes to how Dracthyr look in dragon form with transmog. Other popular requests include dyes for transmog in the style of housing dyes, a refresh of the glyph system, and access in other regions to mounts and housing items that are currently only available in China.

How to follow along

• Watch live: Warcraft on Twitch or YouTube, Thursday, September 17. Modern WoW at 10:00 a.m. PDT, Forever at 10:30 a.m. PDT.
• Can’t watch? Blizzard says a VOD goes up after the broadcast.
• Time zones and schedule: our Q&A preview lists the stream time in other regions.

We will cover the answers that matter for Forever once the stream ends. If the developers share details on talents or class roles, our talent planner is the place to try the builds.