Class changes: what Forever rewrote

Forever’s class design runs on one rule. Abilities that later expansions made core to a spec get pulled back into a level-60 game.

Lava Burst. Mutilate. Victory Rush. Holy Strike. All back, all baseline.

The client holds the rest — 466 talents across 27 trees. That’s what the class pages and their talent calculators are built from.

Warrior

• Victory Rush is baseline for all three specs. Kill something, heal yourself. That fixes solo questing, which is where Warriors hurt most.
• Sunder Armor threat values corrected across every rank.
• Protection swapped Bastion and Focused Rage. Focused Rage lands earlier, so the spec smooths out instead of spiking.
• Rage generation is still the loudest Warrior complaint on the beta forums. Several big threads want the normalisation reverted, not compensated.

Paladin

• Holy gets a new capstone, Light’s Vigil. The spec finally has an area button. Twenty years of single-target triage, and now it can heal or damage a group.
• Voice of Truth gives 6 seconds of immunity to silence and interrupts. That’s a real Holy problem, solved directly.
• Infusion of Light is in, plus better mana regen.
• Retribution gets Holy Strike, a short-cooldown weapon-and-holy hit, plus an absorb shield on attacks.
• Retribution Aura scales with spell power now instead of sitting at a fixed number.
• Consecration bugs fixed, including one where it simply didn’t apply.
• Undead can be Paladins. Loudest change in the expansion.

Shaman

• Lava Burst is back. Elemental players missed it most, and it changes the rotation rather than just adding a button.
• Totemic Projection and Totemic Recall are in. Drop all four totems at once, or pull them back for mana. Both together take about 3 seconds.
• Fire Nova reworked. It doesn’t eat a totem slot any more — it just deals AoE from your fire totem.
• Windfury, Tranquil Air and Grace of Air no longer stack. Not even from different shamans in one group. Stacking shamans is worse than it was.
• Elemental swapped Elemental Fury and Elemental Alacrity, putting crit damage earlier in the tree.
• Dwarf Shamans are new.

Rogue

• Rogues can wield axes now. Quiet change, loud result: Fury Warriors and Rogues want the same drops.
• Assassination leans hard into poisons. Mutilate lands as a major attack.
• Creators call this a rework, not a tuning pass. It got its own beta news post, which is unusual.

Hunter

• Summon Hawks is new. Another creature to manage on top of your pet.
• Marksmanship carries the deeper changes. The other two specs feel familiar.

Mage

• Orc Mages and Alliance Skyborne Mages are both new.
• Frostfire Bolt is baseline. Cross-tree fire/frost builds open up instead of forcing one element.
• Mages get their own system for ciphering scrolls.

Warlock

Barely touched:

• Healing now scales correctly off 10% of the Warlock’s spell healing
• Otherwise unchanged

Warlocks are consistently rated a top leveling class in the beta. Unchanged is arguably a buff.

Druid

• Skyborne Druids get their own forms. First new shapeshift set added to Classic-era Azeroth.
• Feral has a design problem that isn’t about tuning. There’s a long forum thread making that case.

Two warnings before you plan around this

Talent positions move between builds. The beta was taking a new build roughly every day while this was written. A tree that was right last week may be wrong now. The class pages rebuild from the client, so they track the current build instead of a snapshot.

Creator coverage isn’t patch notes. Most of the above came from people reading tooltips on stream. Treat tuning numbers as provisional. Mechanics are safer.

What’s still missing

• Skyborne racials aren’t documented in effect terms yet
• The client has per-spec ability lists (31,703 named spells), but sorting them by spec and cutting the unused ones is ongoing
• All 466 talents are in the talent calculators, with their real positions, ranks and arrows