Ghost Wolf came back glowing blue, and shamans cannot agree whether to fix it or keep it

Of all the things the level 30 build changed, the one that filled the forums was not a talent or an experience rate. It was a travel form.

Shamans logged in on October 1 and found Ghost Wolf glowing bright blue, closer to the modern WoW version than the muted shape Classic players remember. Nobody announced it. By October 4 the Forever forums carried around ten separate threads about it, and they do not agree on anything except that something changed.

Three camps, none of them small

Revert it. The loudest argument is that the form no longer reads as a ghost. One shaman put it as a radioactive wolf rather than a spirit one, and complained the model is also too large. The art-direction crowd is blunter: a brighter, cleaner effect is exactly the Retail drift Forever was supposed to avoid, and another thread simply asked whether this is what Era players were promised when the game was sold on a return to 2004.

Tune it down, do not remove it. A middle group likes the colour and wants the brightness reduced. Their concern is practical rather than aesthetic: a shaman in wolf form is now visible across a zone, which in open-world PvP is the difference between escaping and being caught. Several testers reported spotting a travelling shaman from the far side of a zone and nothing else.

Keep it. The third camp started a thread asking Blizzard not to fix it at all, and if it must be reverted, to leave the glowing version in as a barber shop appearance. Others in that thread proposed a faction split, with the blue form for the Alliance and a red-tinted version for the Horde, which would also answer the long-running request for a dwarf shaman form that is not the same wolf everyone else gets.

What Blizzard has actually said: nothing

This is the part worth being precise about. There is no blue post on Ghost Wolf. It is not in the October 1 development notes, not in the known issues list, and Kaivax has not replied in any of the threads.

One tester wrote in the keep-it thread that a developer had posted on social media saying the new look is temporary, put in because the default form was hard to see in some lighting, and that it will be reverted once that is fixed. We cannot verify that, and we are not treating it as confirmed. It is a second-hand account of a post we have not read, and it is the only explanation anyone has offered.

If it is true, it is also slightly funny: a change made because the old form was too hard to see has produced three days of complaints that the new one is too easy to see.

The build’s two other oddities

Stitches was friendly, and is not any more. Duskwood’s roaming abomination spent the first days of October spawning as a neutral mob. One tester watched him change from hostile to neutral partway along the road to Darkshire, then stand in town while the guards ignored him. Two threads followed, one asking for the fear back as a matter of Duskwood’s character, the other suggesting he had earned retirement.

Updated 6 October: he is hostile again. A tester posting on 5 October describes Stitches coming to attack the town as one of the best things in the zone, which is the behaviour the bug had removed. A Blizzard developer is reported to have announced the fix; we have not read that announcement ourselves, so what we can state is the in-game result rather than the statement.

Gnomeregan dropped nothing. The level 30 cap opened Gnomeregan for the first time, and testers immediately found that bosses were handing out no loot at all, quest items included. Kaivax confirmed a fix on the afternoon of October 3, with the explanation that gnomes broke it. Our dungeon pages cover the rest of the band.

What we will be watching

• Whether Ghost Wolf is reverted in the next build, and whether the glowing version survives anywhere as an option.
• Whether Stitches gets his aggression back before launch on November 4.
• Whether any of this reaches a development notes post. The current build, 1.60.1.70205, arrived with no notes and no table changes at all.

Our shaman page tracks the class changes that do get documented.