What the WoW Forever beta breaks for addons: secret health values, dead secure snippets, new APIs

When Blizzard confirmed that WoW Forever would inherit the combat addon restrictions from retail’s Midnight, the reaction split cleanly in two: raiders worried about their frames, and everyone else assumed it would only touch damage meters and boss mods. The first days of the beta have produced something better than speculation — concrete tests against build 1.60.1.69913, run in the client and recorded with the exact commands that reproduce them.

The short version: it goes further than most people expected, and not all of it looks intentional.

Health is now a secret

This is the big one. In the Forever beta, UnitHealth still returns a value, and Lua even reports its type as a number — but addons cannot compare it or do arithmetic with it. The test is a one-liner:

/run local h = UnitHealth("player"); print(type(h), pcall(function() return h + 1 end))

It prints number false: a number you are not allowed to add one to. Grid2 hits the wall immediately, throwing attempt to perform arithmetic on a secret number value (execution tainted by ‘Grid2’).

The practical fallout is large. Third-party raid frames cannot draw health bars, cannot show percentages, and cannot fire low-health warnings, because every one of those is maths on a number the addon is not permitted to use. Blizzard’s own frames are unaffected — the restriction targets tainted addon code, not the display.

For healers, this is the change that matters. Vuhdo, Grid2, Cell and their relatives built their whole value on reading health quickly and presenting it better than the default UI does. In Forever, as the beta stands, they cannot read it at all.

Secure snippets do not compile

The second finding looks less like design and more like a missing piece. Blizzard’s restricted-environment code, RestrictedExecution.lua, fetches an engine function called loadstring_untainted at line 22 and calls it at line 79. The Forever client never provides it:

/run print(type(loadstring_untainted), type(loadstring))

prints nil function, and every secure snippet dies with RestrictedExecution.lua:79: attempt to call a nil value.

Secure snippets are the sanctioned, combat-safe way for addons to do things Blizzard explicitly allows: action bar paging, secure group headers and click-casting all run through them. That is why this reads like a bug rather than policy — the whole point of the restricted environment is to let addons do these things safely, and Blizzard’s own code expects the function to exist. Treat it as something likely to be fixed in a later build, but do not plan a raid around Clique working on launch day until it is.

The client says it is retail

A quieter break that will catch a lot of libraries. WOW_PROJECT_ID is 1, the same value as WOW_PROJECT_MAINLINE, so an addon that asks which game it is running on is told retail, not Classic. Addons that pick their code path from that value will take the retail branch, even though the game underneath is vanilla.

The failure is sneaky. A guard like if WOW_PROJECT_ID ~= WOW_PROJECT_CLASSIC then return end compares 1 with 2, so it returns straight away. Libraries written to load only on Classic never load at all, silently, with no error to point at.

The old API calls have moved

Finally, a batch of long-standing globals are simply gone in 69913: GetItemInfo, GetSpellInfo, GetSpellBookItemName, GetNumTalentTabs, GetTalentInfo and GetNumSkillLines. Items and spells now answer through C_Item and C_Spell, as they do on retail. Talents are the bigger shift — they run on the modern trait system, through C_Traits, which makes sense given Forever’s reworked talent trees but means every talent-reading addon needs rewriting, not patching.

This one is not a restriction; it is modernisation. It is also the one that will quietly break the most addons, because nearly everything calls GetItemInfo somewhere.

What it means for launch

Sort the four findings by intent and a picture emerges:

Finding	Looks like
Secret health values	Deliberate — matches Midnight
Secure snippets failing	Probably a bug — Blizzard’s own code expects the function
Client reports retail	Unclear — may change once Forever gets its own project ID
Globals moved to C_	Deliberate — retail API base

For players, the takeaway is simple: do not assume your Classic addon folder will work. Raid frames are the most exposed. Action bars and click-casting depend on whether the snippet issue is fixed. Everything else depends on authors porting to the retail-style API, which the good ones will do quickly, since most already maintain retail versions.

For addon authors, the beta is open and the commands above reproduce every finding. That is a far better position than discovering all of this on launch night.

Data from the WoW Forever beta, build 1.60.1.69913, via the daybreakforever.com datamine, generated 2026-09-18. Unreleased test data — subject to change.

Updated September 18, 2026: an earlier version said WOW_PROJECT_ID was missing. The retest behind the datamine shows it is 1, the retail value, and we corrected that section.