WoW Forever Patch Notes Checked Against the Game Files

Blizzard has published twelve posts about WoW Forever’s beta since Sep 21: three rounds of development notes, a Warrior update, four class deep dives and articles on races, the Skyborne, rulesets and the Legacy system. We split them into 1,040 lines and checked every one against the game’s own client files, build by build, with the hotfixes the server sends applied.

Verdict	Lines
Matches the files	661
Partly matches	68
Changed after it was posted	18
Says the opposite of the files	6
Not something the files can show (server rules, XP, threat, bug fixes)	233
No claim to check (design goals, lore)	54

Of the 753 lines the files can settle, 661 match: 88%. Blizzard’s notes are mostly right. The rest is where players get caught out, because a note is what they read and the files are what they play.

Six lines that say the opposite

Penance was cut the day the notes said it went up. The Oct 8 notes say “Healing done by Penance has been increased on Penance ranks 2 and 4.” Build 70291, the build those notes shipped with, cut every rank’s healing and dropped its spell power share from 28.5% to 19%.

Rank	Before 70291	Build 70291 onward
Penance 1	184 a tick	134 at level 39
Penance 2	291	209 at level 49
Penance 3	482	279 at level 59
Penance 4	673	425

Ranks 1 to 3 now grow a little with level, so the table shows each at the level the game’s tooltip uses for it.

Shred lost weapon damage. The Hunter and Druid deep dive says Shred’s damage was “increased significantly”. In the files Shred deals 155% weapon damage plus 180, where Classic dealt 225% plus 180, on every rank. Any gain would have to come from the server’s own Cat Form tuning. The full Shred check.

The Shaman’s second and third totem sets are swapped. The Mage and Shaman deep dive puts Call of the Spirits at level 30 and Call of the Ancestors at 40. The files teach Call of the Ancestors at 30 and Call of the Spirits at 40, and their tooltips agree with the files. Call of the Ancestors at level 30.

Two Priest racials “unchanged” have changed. The Priest deep dive lists Touch of Weakness and Hex of Weakness as unchanged. Both now cut the enemy’s melee attack power where Classic cut its damage: Hex of Weakness lowers attack power by 204 at rank 6, where Classic lowered damage by 20.

Eighteen that changed after they were posted

Most are Warriors. The Priest and Warrior deep dive went out on Sep 30, and on Oct 2 Blizzard reworked the class with a server hotfix and a post of its own. Eleven lines of the deep dive no longer describe the game: Boundless Rage and Improved Cleave are gone, Dual Wield Specialization traded its off-hand hit for off-hand Rage, and Raging Blows became a Rage cost cut. The Oct 1 notes’ 75% more Rage on critical hits was 10 in the files; the Oct 2 hotfix set it to 100, the figure Blizzard’s Oct 2 post gives.

One is Legacy’s. Blizzard’s Sep 23 article says Reagent Economy also makes tier 1 camping features free to craft. That clause was in the tooltip in build 69977 and left it in 70009; today the perk only removes vendor-bought reagents from class abilities.

Changes no post mentions

The same Oct 2 hotfix did three things to Warrior talents that Blizzard’s Oct 2 post doesn’t list:

Precision is gone. The Fury talent for 1/2/3% hit was deleted from the tree.
Bastion moved down a row, from 5 to 6 in Protection.
Focused Rage moved up, from 6 to 5.

What changed for Warriors has the whole tree against Classic.

What the files can’t tell

233 lines are out of reach of any client file. XP, threat, drop rates, respawn times, quest rewards and most bug fixes live on Blizzard’s servers. Those lines carry a “Not in the files” label rather than a guess. Some of them can be checked in game, and we fold those in as we see them.

Every line, with its evidence

Each of the 1,040 lines, its verdict and the evidence behind it (the spell, the number, the build) is on Blizzard’s notes, checked, one page per post. When a new build changes a line’s verdict, the page says which build did it.

We checked all 1,040 lines of Blizzard's WoW Forever notes against the game files