Too retail, or not enough? The argument splitting the WoW Forever beta, and the gear numbers behind it

Every Classic+ project ends up having the same argument, and WoW Forever’s beta got there in four days. The most liked thread on the official forums this week is titled “This is Retail with a Vanilla Mask”: nearly 250 replies, more than 4,000 views and close to 600 likes across the thread.

The “too retail” case

The original post was written four hours into the beta, and it lists what broke the Classic feeling for its author:

• mobs feel weak, and the power fantasy arrives too early;
• professions start from a quest, so there is no reason to travel to a capital city to learn one;
• the modern interface replaces the Classic frames;
• class combinations arrive with no story — Horde Paladins and Alliance Shamans on day one, where retail took expansions and lore to get there.

A second thread, “Initial Take - Feels Too Much Like Retail”, with 96 replies, adds the Skyborne starting zone’s models to the list and ends with a wish for Wrath anniversary servers instead.

The answer: “it’s 70–80% Classic”

The replies are far from unanimous. The most common counter-argument is that Forever was announced as something new, not a re-release — “Forever is like 70–80% classic”, one player writes, and “we all knew it wasn’t going to be just a classic experience”. Others point out that Classic Era servers still exist for anyone who wants the 2019 game unchanged.

The pace of levelling is used on both sides. One player reports a guildmate reaching 17 in about 16 hours; another, who has levelled many Hardcore characters, took 16 and a half hours to reach 20 on a Shaman and says that is in line with the 12–16 hours they usually need for 1–20 in Classic. On this evidence the difference is less about speed and more about where the experience comes from: dungeon quests pay a lot, dungeon kills much less. Our dungeon XP report covers that change.

The part with numbers: gear

Where the argument gets concrete is itemisation. A thread titled “Power Creep is already WAY too high and we’re not even level 30” has 159 likes, and its complaints are specific:

• spell power and healing on leveling gear, where Classic had almost none, with base spell damage lowered to compensate — which is also why wands hit as hard as spells early on;
• a level 10 blue with +4 Strength and +4 Stamina, stats the author calls level 24 values;
• dungeon drops that are almost all rares, with few of the odd white and green items with mixed stats that made Classic’s loot feel random;
• one reply mentions a green quest dagger with more spell power than blues from level 50 dungeons.

The counter here is that Forever moved power from base stats into gear on purpose, so gear numbers have to be higher.

A newer thread looks further ahead. “WoW Forever Won’t Stay Forever If Gear Keeps Scaling” argues that Forever’s promise of horizontal progression only works with a real ceiling: if each raid still drops slightly better gear, old raids become trivial, returning players fall behind and battlegrounds turn into a gear check — the same path, it says, that Season of Discovery took.

Why it matters for your build

For players, the practical side of this debate is that gear matters more in Forever than in Classic at the same level. Spell power on greens, strong quest rewards and dungeon blues change which spec feels good — it is a big part of why casters are told to keep a wand in hand and why our level 20 guides push dungeon quest rewards. The gear pages list the Forever items we know about so far.

Blizzard has not responded in any of these threads. With a month of beta left and the level 30 phase still to come, itemisation is one of the easier things to tune — the identity question will take longer.