WoW Forever build 70009: respecs drop to 1 silver, wands are nerfed and the Cooldown Manager arrives

The beta went down for a couple of hours on September 24, and came back as build 1.60.1.70009 with something the beta has not had until now: real patch notes. The development notes post has already passed 84,000 views, and it answers several of the loudest complaints from the first week.

Respecs now cost 1 silver

The headline change for anyone testing talents:

If you have not recently changed your talents, the cost is now 1 silver to re-spec.

After your first reset the next one is much more expensive, but the price drops back to 1 silver after an hour. Blizzard is explicit that this is temporary and beta-only, so do not plan your launch gold around it.

This is exactly what testers asked for in the threads we covered when a second respec cost 5 gold at level 20. The argument was that the beta exists to test the new trees, and the price stopped people testing. Blizzard did not reply in those threads, but the change landed a few days later.

Wands no longer scale with spell power

The other big number change:

Wands: Wands no longer gain any additional damage from the user’s spell damage.

That ends the debate we wrote about on Tuesday, where a thread called wand Priests the strongest spec in the beta. Wizard Oil went back to Classic Era values at the same time: 8, 16 and 24 spell power for Minor, Lesser and normal, with Brilliant unchanged.

If you levelled a caster around wanding, expect your damage to drop noticeably at the same gear level.

The Cooldown Manager is testable

Forever’s built-in cooldown tracker is now live, but off by default. Turn it on in Options → Gameplay Enhancement. Details worth knowing:

• only Druid, Mage, Priest, Warrior and Warlock are ready for testing, with more classes later;
• it does not support spell ranks yet;
• Blizzard is specifically asking which spells you wish were tracked by default;
• known issues already listed: Banes and Curses lose tracking if you drop and reacquire a target, Healthstone and pet cooldowns cannot be tracked, Arcane Blast cannot be tracked, and Priest tracks everything by default.

Camping got much less annoying

A cluster of fixes makes campfires usable:

• you can now buff others, cast and craft while waiting for your campfire buff;
• you get the buff while sitting, sitting in a chair, sleeping, lying down or kneeling, not only in one pose;
• crafting or casting no longer yanks you to your feet and cancels the wait.

Fixes that matter outside combat

• A memory leak that slowly degraded performance is fixed.
• Mac water rendering and other display artifacts are fixed, following the detailed bug reports Blizzard thanked testers for.
• In-game mail could ignore surnames. That is the bug behind players not being able to mail alts that shared a first name.
• Casters play their precast animations again instead of standing still mid-cast.

Around twenty quest fixes

Most are respawn rates in the crowded early zones, which is the friction players hit hardest at launch: Defias Messenger in Westfall, Murloc camps at Crystal Lake, Shinyfinder Narf and Nimsy in Elwynn, Snow Leopard Prowler in Dun Morogh, Pyrewood worgen in Silverpine, water pitchers in Mulgore. Shinyfinder Narf’s quest item can now be looted by every party member.

Other notable ones:

• Zephras Isle: the High Order quest Catching Wind was redesigned, and A Firm Response no longer fails to grant credit, closing the bug we covered on Tuesday;
• Teldrassil: Bounty: Gnarlpine Furbolg needs 15 instead of 20;
• Elwynn Forest: Jasperlode and Fargodeep Mine were deadlier than intended for solo players, so Blizzard, in its own words, took their candles away;
• dungeon quests that could be shared to hand out a free quest item were fixed.

Gamepad support keeps growing

Class flyouts arrived: shapeshift for Druids, pet control for Hunters and Warlocks, auras for Paladins, stances for Warriors. There are new options for a compact action bar, fixed party targeting on the D-pad, and swapping the targeting modifier sides.

One new known issue to watch

Creating or changing party composition may transfer players to a different world instance.

If you group up and someone vanishes, that is why. Blizzard says improvements are coming.

Our class changes breakdown covers the tuning in this build spec by spec. The beta hub tracks every build.