WoW Forever is live, with elite nameplates and a swing timer that stays put

WoW Forever is open. The servers came up on November 4 at 3:00 p.m. PST in every region at once, so Europe got in at midnight and Australia and New Zealand on the morning of November 5. We covered the single worldwide start time last week; this piece is about what changed on the day itself.

Nine interface fixes that landed on launch day

A few hours before the servers opened, Kaivax added a User Interface and Accessibility section to the development notes thread. None of these change how a class plays, but several of them you will notice in your first hour:

• Elite mobs are marked again. Nameplates were not showing the elite marker. That matters while leveling, because an elite pack is the difference between a clean pull and a corpse run. It is fixed.
• Debuffs on nameplates no longer eat your clicks. You can click straight through the debuff icons to target the mob behind them.
• The swing timer stays visible. The bar used to fade when you moved out of range. It now holds until the swing actually finishes, which helps anyone timing Heroic Strike or Slam.
• Combined bags show where a slot lives. With the combined bag turned on, each slot’s background now shows which bag it comes from.
• Spellbook and Talents open level with other windows, and the Spellbook’s combat mode takes up less room.
• The PvP scoreboard has a new layout.
• No more fake honor at the cap. Kills at the honor cap no longer print honor gained in floating text or chat.
• Keybinding is easier. In the keybinds menu, hovering an action bar binding now highlights that button on your bars.

The build you are playing

The client build on live is 1.60.1.70790, dated November 4. We read it with its server hotfixes the morning after launch. It changes two talent values and no talent layouts, so every guide order still stands:

• Warrior Defiance now adds 7 / 13 / 20% threat in Defensive Stance with a shield, up from 5 / 10 / 15%. Good news for Protection tanks in fresh dungeon groups.
• Rogue Death Mark now stores Garrote and Rupture damage at twice the rate, so keeping both bleeds up before the finisher pays off more.

The talent calculator already shows the new tooltips. If something in a guide no longer matches what you see in game, the comments under each guide are the fastest way to tell us.

What to do first

If you are logging in tonight, three of our pages are made for exactly this:

1. The day-one launch checklist covers the first hour and the first ten levels.
2. The launch day status page lists known issues and server problems, each with a source, plus Blizzard’s own status links.
3. The fastest leveling plan lays out 1 to 60 with quests, dungeon quests and riding at 40.

Pick a class with the leveling tier list, open its guide, and the talent order tells you what to take at every level. Good luck out there.