A rolling reset on the WoW Forever beta did more than fix performance. After the servers came back, Stitches was hostile again, character creation had real standard-definition portraits, and experience from the easy sources had been cut. Launch is still November 4. This is the beta telling people the open world is the point.
Stitches is the one players noticed first. He still spawns friendly. Once he reaches his usual patrol on the Duskwood road, he is hostile, and he will wipe a party that walks into him. For a stretch of the test you could treat the abomination like scenery. That window is closed. Duskwood has its road boss back.
The art toggle moved with the reset. Forever already let you switch between a higher-definition look and a classic one. The portraits did not always follow. They do now. Drop to standard definition and the creation-screen faces swap to the older set, undead included. Blizzard has said it is still working through that classic look for anyone who wants the 2004 read instead of the updated lighting. The portrait swap is the piece you can see before you leave the character screen.
Loot rarity moved the other way. Some rewards that had been landing as blues are greens now. The one players are naming is Friend of the Library, a new quest where you turn in 20 books. It had been paying a rare necklace. A necklace that early in Classic was a real slot, the kind of item you wore for ten levels because nothing else existed. A brand-new book quest handing one out as a blue was ahead of the curve the rest of the game still uses. It is an uncommon necklace now. There are also some dungeon quest rewards that became greens and a few reworked dungeon items.
The experience cuts are the change that will show up in /played. Low-level open-world mobs give less XP. The stated reason is the extra experience already sitting on the beta: food buffs, and rested experience from camping. Dungeon mob XP is down too, and end-of-dungeon quest XP is below what vanilla paid. The direction is the open world. Forever added campsites, profession objects, and more than a thousand new quests so the road between dungeons would be the game. If dungeon clears were the fastest bar to 20, that road was optional.
Players had already turned the instances into speed leveling routes. Deadmines wall skips, packs left alive, a clear aimed at the boss and the quest turn-in. That is a key-run habit on a beta that is still supposed to be a leveling world. Cutting the mob XP and the dungeon quest XP is Blizzard answering that route. It does not delete the skip. It makes the skip pay less than questing through the zone the instance sits in.
Camping and more exp gaining foods/items is part of why XP rates got nerfed. A fire is a rest stop: vendor, repair, profession stations, and an hour of buffs if you sit. Granting players a little bit more power and faster leveling. Higher cooking fires hold more objects, including several buffs at once. Food was reworked. Rested experience from a camp stacks on top of the old inn bonus. Leave those rates at Classic numbers and a player who cooks and sits for campfires to get the tent rested experience outlevels the zone before the new quests show up. The mob XP cut is the counterweight to slow down over leveling.
Dual spec is the other number in circulation. It opens at 40 and costs 40 gold, on top of earlier respec fees, so the full swap is being talked about as 50 gold. However we will see what it actually turns out to be as we get closer to release or on release.
Class work is still landing beside all of this. Bears keep weapon damage in form. Affliction drains instead of bolt-weaving. Every priest can cast Devouring Plague. Professions got a pass of their own: Smelting Pants and Cookie's Stirring Rod matter again, the Arcanite blacksmith hammer is a throwing stun, and skinning is one hide per corpse. Read up on more details about classes in our other recent article.
Are you rerouting onto quests after the XP cut, or still clearing Deadmines anyway? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.