World of Warcraft Forever is just a day away, and now that the beta has concluded Blizzard has released its patch notes for the release build of the game.
A bulk of the patch notes focus on class changes where, among other things, Blizzard rolled back some Shaman abilities like Lava Burst to focus the Elemental spec identity on lightning ability. And that's just one of dozens of class changes. Blizzard's goal with these class changes was to distill Forever's combat into its own identity. According to the developer notes, "some of this round of changes reflects areas where we were likely hasty in turning to Burning Crusade- or Wrath-era solutions rather than carving out new ones that better fit into the Forever combat model."
This will likely be the only major class tuning that Blizzard is going to touch before raids open next month, which is perfectly in line with how the company typically launches WoW games and expansions. The developers want to gather data on how people are playing before it changes how anything is balanced, which only makes sense.
However, Blizzard will still tweak classes to fix bugs, according to the developer notes. "With the exception of bugs and serious outliers, we don’t plan on making big tuning changes between now and the opening of the raids next month," the developer said. "Once we have sufficient data from players leveling past 30 and engaging in a wide range of content, we expect that we will do a large tuning pass based on our data."
But apart from the mass of class changes, World of Warcraft Forever's controller support has "entered a complete functional state," and gamepads can now be used in every facet of the MMO. Xbox even put out its own blog post talking about Forever's controller support, claiming that it "reimagines the way we play." WoW Forever's beta supported controllers, but that support was only in an alpha stage, and had its own limitations and bugs. Hopefully this "complete functional state" means Blizzard has figured those issues out.
I, for one, plan to download WoW Forever on an Xbox Ally X, so that I can grind while I watch TV. But because Forever's controller UI looks so similar to Final Fantasy XIV's controller interface, I can't help but wonder if this controller support is just a precursor for a full Xbox Series X release. We'll just have to wait and see what happens there.
Finally, the patch notes do detail some nerfs coming to racial abilities. Dwarves and Orcs both straight up had one of their passive abilities removed from the game, while many other races had their passives nerfed. For instance, Humans' Ruthless ability now increases critical strike chance by 1%, rather than 2%. But, hey, at least Trolls get a longer duration on Berserking – their mini-bloodlust.
Only time will tell how balance is going to fall in WoW Forever, but we won't have to wait long to see how it plays out. World of Warcraft Forever comes out tomorrow, November 4, at 3pm PST / 6pm EST, and if the beta was any indication, a lot of people are going to rush in to really push WoW's servers to their breaking point. And I'll be right there to watch it happen.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.ign.com/articles/world-of-warcraft-forever-launch-patch-notes-bring-controller-support-and-massive-class-changes
