Launch day in Forever: six things we would do first, and two Classic habits we would drop

Forever opens worldwide on November 4 at 3:00 pm PST. Below is what we would do in the first hours, and — more useful than another list of tips — the two things we would have done out of pure Classic habit that this version has quietly made worse.

Everything here is labelled: client data means we can read it in the shipping build, tester-reported means someone played it and we cannot verify the number ourselves, and where we simply do not know, we say so.

1. Learn Cooking before anything else

This is our strongest recommendation and it has nothing to do with buff food. In Forever the old Cooking Fire has become a Basic Campfire that creates a campsite with rest, vendors, repairs and profession workspaces. The campfire is the entry point to the whole camping system.

Every profession has three campsite objects, and the first is learned at skill 20 — low enough to reach in your first session — from camping NPCs or profession trainers. Each one gives a one-hour buff, and that buff does not stack with the matching class buff, so a group should spread them rather than double up. (Client data, plus Blizzard’s own deep dive.)

The per-profession objects are on our professions pages.

2. Keep every Waylaid Crate you find

Worth knowing before you sell one by accident. A Waylaid Crate drops as ordinary loot, and reading its label turns it into a specific shipment such as Waylaid Crate: Apprentice Ingots. You fill it with any one bundle from its list — 20 Copper Bar, or 20 Tin Bar, or 10 Bronze Bar — and hand it in for Merchant’s Favor, the currency that buys profession recipes.

Testers place the Horde hand-in at a Durotar Supply and Logistics camp just west of the Crossroads. (Client data for the crates themselves, tester-reported for the camp.)

One honest gap: we do not know how much Favor a crate pays, or what the recipes cost. Those numbers are not in the files we can read, and nobody has published them. Everything we do have is on our Merchant’s Favor page.

3. Put the crafting profession on the character who will wear the gear

Still two primaries plus Cooking as a secondary, so the structure is unchanged — but one detail changes where you put them. Testers report that the strong Merchant’s Favor recipes are Bind on Pickup.

If that holds, a dedicated crafter alt cannot make your gear for you. The profession has to sit on the character who will use the output. (Tester-reported.) Our alt guide plans a roster around that assumption.

4. Start the Sleeping Bag chain early

The maths is better than it first looks. Resting in the Cozy Sleeping Bag gives 1% experience per minute up to 3%, and it stacks with the 5% from a cooked meal — so 8% from level 1 if you pair it with the Cooking advice above. Across a run to 60 that is hours of play.

It is a five-zone quest chain that ends in a jumping puzzle in Hillsbrad. The route with all five coordinates is on the site, along with the warning that Horde players have the longer run. (Client data for the buff, tester-reported for the route.)

Two Classic habits we would drop

The bank alt

Sound advice for twenty years, and Forever has undercut the main reason for it. The client’s gold sinks show an Account Bank whose tabs run from 1 silver to 2 gold 50 silver, against 100, 200 and 400 gold for a character’s sixth, seventh and eighth bank tabs. Shared storage is now the cheap option by three orders of magnitude. There is also a Legacy perk, Personal Banking, that lets innkeepers open your bank for you. (Client data.)

A bank alt still has uses — a parking spot in a capital, a second set of hands at the Auction House — but “roll one so you have somewhere to put things” is no longer the argument it was, and it costs you a character slot in a game where you only get three during name reservation.

Treating that early quest bag as your bag plan

The Sleeping Bag chain hands out a 12-slot bag along the way, and it is tempting to plan around it. We would not. A tester wrote in early October that they ran the chain mainly for that bag and found it nerfed, and nobody has posted its current size since. We cannot read it either — it is not in the datamined files.

So run the chain for the experience buff, which is confirmed, and treat the bag as a bonus of unknown size. The same chain’s food item, Student Fodder, has an unconfirmed level requirement: a level 23 tester was told they were too low to use it and never got an answer as to why. (Tester-reported, unresolved.)

What we cannot confirm yet

We would rather list these than guess at them:

• Favor paid per crate, and recipe prices. Not in the client files.
• The current size of the Sleeping Bag chain’s bag. Reported nerfed, no number since.
• Student Fodder’s level requirement. One tester blocked at 23, no answer.

One caveat on all of the above: the shipping client is build 1.60.1.70707, while the crate and chain reports come from testers on 70205. Where our data and launch-day reality disagree, it is our data that is more likely to be out of date, and we will correct these pages as people play.

And the obvious one

The servers open at one moment worldwide — 3:00 pm PST on November 4, which is the small hours of the 5th across Europe. Nobody playing at midnight is going to out-level the people who slept. Take whatever suits your schedule off this list and leave the rest.

The rest of the day-one list is on our launch page and the launch checklist.