No shared tagging in WoW Forever: Blizzard says it 'must hold the line', even as players queue for rocks

Mob tagging was one of the loudest complaints from day two of the beta. Now Blizzard has answered, and the answer is no.

What Greenfield said

Replying to a discussion on X about shared kill credit, senior game designer Josh Greenfield said shared tagging is “one of those things that we simply must hold the line on”. His reasoning: keeping some friction is extremely important to Forever’s social pillar. It is hard to see the value while you are annoyed, he said, but it is part of what makes players group up.

The important caveat is that he also said there are other things the team can do to reduce the frustration, just not shared tagging. No details yet, but faster respawns in busy areas or more quest objects are the obvious candidates.

What it looks like in the beta

The first-tag rule means only the first player or group to hit a mob gets credit. In starting zones with hundreds of players, that turns kill 7 wolves into a race. The classic workaround still works: invite the people around you. Group members share credit, and the invite takes seconds.

The harder cases are objects. Gathering nodes and quest items are server-side in Forever. When someone loots one, it is gone for everyone until it respawns. PC Gamer described the Orgrimmar quest Rocks to Rest, where you need eight rocks: with ten players camping sporadic spawns, it became a sprint every time one appeared. Other quests have produced polite queues. Some have not.

Will it get better?

Partly, on its own. Launch-day crowds spread out once players level past the starting areas. But November 4 will be the busiest week of all, and layering has its own problems: testers have already reported quest progress lost when a layer switched.

Our take: the grouping argument works for mobs, because a group shares the kill. It works less well for single-looter objects, where a group does not help. That is where we expect Blizzard’s other fixes to land.

Tips until then

• Invite first, ask later. Most players accept a group for a kill quest.
• Skip the crowd. Do the contested quest later, or pick up a different zone’s quests first. Our leveling guides list alternative routes for every starting area.
• Use the quest log. Forever raised the cap from 20 to 40 quests, so you can hold a crowded quest and come back when it is quiet.

We will cover any respawn or tagging-related changes in the next beta build.