WoW Forever has a secret snake form, and druids unlock it in Wailing Caverns

The best WoW Forever discoveries are the ones nobody announced. Here is the current favourite: a druid shapeshift form that turns you into a snake, and it comes from a level 20s dungeon set.

How it works

Wear the full five-piece Embrace of the Viper, the of the Fang set that drops in Wailing Caverns, and your druid shapeshift becomes a serpent. No tooltip mentions it. The set reads like any other dungeon set until the fifth piece goes on.

For anyone who ran Wailing Caverns in 2004, the joke lands twice: the set was already themed around the serpent druids of the cavern, and Forever finally made the theme literal.

Why this keeps happening

This is not an accident, it is a policy. Blizzard has said it deliberately kept many new items out of the files dataminers read, so players would find them in the world, and that an item’s stats stay hidden until it actually drops for someone on your ruleset.

A cosmetic set bonus is the perfect hiding place. It does not change your damage, so nobody looking at spreadsheets would notice, and it only shows up when someone collects all five pieces and shapeshifts.

It joins a growing list from the same beta:

• an axe from the Deadmines that mines ore without the Mining profession;
• the Coldflame Saber from Shadowfang Keep, which rewards a mage for fighting in melee;
• the Cozy Sleeping Bag and its 3% experience buff;
• a library of 40 books with its own reward track.

Worth chasing?

At level 20 the set is a reasonable leveling option for a feral druid on its stats alone, so the form is a bonus rather than a detour. The catch is the dungeon: Wailing Caverns is long, and five specific drops take several runs.

If you want it for launch rather than the beta, remember that beta progress is wiped on November 4. Our dungeon guides cover the Wailing Caverns route and its quests, and the full list of finds like this one lives in our secrets section.