Client vs client
Forever adds. It doesn't take away.
This page compares two real clients: the live Classic Era build and the current Forever beta. Both are read from Blizzard's own data, so the diff below isn't opinion or patch-note summary.
Classic Era
40
legal race and class combinations
Forever
56
legal race and class combinations
Removed
0
nothing was taken away
Six new options for races that already existed
This is the part with no write-up anywhere. Every one of these was illegal in Classic.
Undead Paladin got a fourteen-thousand-view forum thread on its own. It's one of six. Dwarf Shaman and Troll Warlock are the same kind of change and almost nobody has picked up on them — Classic players spent twenty years treating those combinations as things that don't exist.
Ten options that come with the new race
The Skyborne land with ten combinations across two separate race entries the client keeps apart.
The two Skyborne are the two factions. High Order takes a Mage and no Shaman; Windshaper takes a Shaman and no Mage. Creators in the beta put it plainly — the Alliance Skyborne get the mage, the Horde Skyborne get the shaman — and the client's class lists line up with that exactly.
So the race that looked like an unexplained data quirk is really the neutral-race faction split, stored as two rows.
What this page doesn't cover yet
Items, spells and talents ship in numbers that make an honest diff slower than a race/class table: 4,581 rare-or-better items, 432 talent points and 2,436 recipes are all indexed, and a first pass at the item diff turned up mostly noise — incidental changes like item level 0 flipping to 1. That work is in progress and will land here when the signal is good enough to publish.