WoW Forever's character panel now explains your stats, and missed loot turns up in your mailbox

Not every change in the WoW Forever beta makes a headline. Two small ones will save a lot of confusion: a character window that explains your stats, and loot that finds you even when you could not reach the corpse.

A character window that explains itself

The character window has been rebuilt for Forever. Its stats code is new, and it shows up by name in a beta error report on the EU forums. The part you will notice: hover over a stat and a tooltip explains what it does for your class. In Classic you had to work that out from guides or addons.

Not every stat appears in the window, and some effects are still easy to miss. Here is what has changed:

• One Critical Strike stat. Most gear has a single Critical Strike Chance instead of separate melee and spell crit. The main exceptions come from buffs and talents.
• One Attack Power. Most gear gives Attack Power that raises melee and ranged damage equally.
• Spirit matters for healers. Every healer spec has a talent for mana regeneration during combat, which makes Spirit a strong healing stat.
• No haste on gear yet. No beta gear found so far has haste. It exists only as effects, such as the Troll racial Berserking and the Skyborne passive Wind Blessed.
• The old caps still apply. 440 Defense makes a tank uncrittable against raid bosses. Armor tops out at 75% physical damage reduction, and each resistance school at 75%.

The new window has at least one early bug: a player on the EU forums posted a Lua error from its stats code when opening the character window.

Loot you missed comes by mail

The second change shows up when things go wrong. Beta players report the Postmaster mailing them loot they could not pick up, for example when a rare’s corpse despawned instantly after the kill.

The clearest example is Vassti the Broodmother: players found her corpse vanishing the moment she died, and several say the Postmaster then sent them her loot, including Broodmaster’s Embrace. That fits how the Postmaster works in the modern game, which Blizzard support describes in its standard reply: loot from instances, world bosses and one-time treasure chests can be mailed.

The catch is that quest items are not mailed, and neither are bind-on-equip items or loot left on ordinary corpses in the open world. Vassti’s Claw, the quest item she drops, did not arrive, so players on A Familiar Taste of Poison could not finish the quest until the despawn bug is fixed.

In the long-running Area wide Looting please thread, one player took mailed loot as a sign that Blizzard is moving toward easier looting, and hoped for area looting next.

What to do in the beta

• Check your mailbox after a dungeon or a rare kill that went wrong. Missed loot may be waiting.
• Report quest items that vanish in game with the NPC’s name. The Postmaster cannot rescue those.
• Use the tooltips to compare gear, and our talent calculator to see how talents change your stats.

Blizzard has not published official notes on either change. We will update this if it does.