What changed, and what we fixed
Every announcement and beta change, and which pages here were corrected as a result. Blue posts sit in the second tab.
Read alongside The lists here say what happened. The Beta section says which of it Blizzard confirmed, which of it somebody reported, and which of it is a guess with a date attached. To the Beta section
New trees and the beta in numbers
- Rumor: paladin and druid rebuilt in the launch client, Berserk gone, Lacerate, Bloom and Oath of Light added
- Beta by the numbers: 8.86 million characters, 1.89 million of them Skyborne, the Hall of Thanes the deadliest dungeon
Changed here: the talent calculator is on client 1.60.1.70630 plus the hotfixes of 28 and 30 October, with 465 talents. Shared build links keep working. The build chronicle has a page for 70630, and the class deep dives note the rebuilds.
The last week before launch
- Launch times by region: 3:00 p.m. PST on November 4, midnight in central Europe, plus the choice between the Classic and Enhanced presets
- Final pass on racials: Command returns, Ruthless halved, Skyborne stronger at ley lines and convergences
- Podcast episode 6: layering, world moves with a time window, separate faction balance on Roleplay-PvP
- Blizzard quietly revises the ruleset article: Roleplay-PvP gets its own description, "the PvP rulesets" in the plural
- Name reservation: a delay in Europe, an Oceanic bug, and wrongly restricted names
- MeinMMO interview (reported): layering comes first, the new raids sit between Molten Core and Blackwing Lair
- IGN interview (reported): major patches about every four months, PvP seasons on the same spacing, dual spec at launch
- Rumor: hunters get weaker, five new clients up to 1.60.1.70707
- Short story "Unbowed" about a Forsaken who serves the Light
- Around launch: a poster signing on November 2 in Irvine, the "WARPATH" launch trailer and an official Discord
New here: the News section, every item on a page of its own with its source and label. Changed here: the racial abilities are on the state of October 26 and 27, the rulesets page covers separate faction balance on Roleplay-PvP, battlegrounds across rulesets and paused character creation, and the honor and ranks page gives the reported four months per PvP season.
Dalaran open, warrior rework in the client
- Build 1.60.1.70291 (8 October) opens the City of Dalaran for testing, with notes from Blizzard; 70245 the day before changed nothing
- Experience from dungeon creatures up about 20%; groups are no longer penalised for their highest-level member
- All testers get the Legacy Challenge and with it 16 Legacy points - the promise of 1 October, kept
- Rage from damage taken recalculated for questing warriors and druids; critical strikes in PvP no longer reduced
- Blizzard lays out the Darkspear Islands (levels 30-60, first to 2000 points) and the honor and rank system with a weekly cap
- Skyborne get SD models in early 2027; four more class deep dives (mage, shaman, rogue, warlock), only the paladin is missing
- The same client changes the talent and spell tables: the warrior rework is in, Predatory Instincts is now Natural Instinct
Added here: a page with the week's news, each item labelled confirmed, reported or rumour. Changed here: the talent calculator shows 70291, Dalaran is marked open, the Darkspear Islands and PvP pages carry Blizzard's details, the schedule counts three of five promises kept, and the class deep dives cover eight classes. Corrected: earlier entries justified "no warrior rework in the client" with a table the Forever talents do not use; the conclusion stands, the evidence is now the right one.
Two clients without a data change, two fixes without a client
- Build 1.60.1.70205 (3 October) changes graphics shaders, program libraries and two interface scripts, the talent display among them - no data table
- Build 1.60.1.70235 (6 October) changes only the game's loader and crash handlers
- Gnomeregan: no boss dropped loot on 3 October; Blizzard fixed it the same afternoon
- The dialog that told Australian testers their social features were locked is fixed as of 4 October
- On 5 October Blizzard restarts the realms "to apply some fixes" - which ones, it does not say
- Warrior: the Fury and Protection rework from the notes of 1 October is not in 70235 either; the tracker that regenerates the game's tables from the CDN finds no change since 70178
Changed here: two new build pages (70205, 70235). The page on changes without a build number has a section on the first week of October, and the class deep dives give the warrior's state up to 70235.
Level 30 is live - with three dungeons, without a battleground
- Build 1.60.1.70170 raises the level cap to 30 - the first of the four promises from the start of the beta is kept
- The Excavation Site in the Wetlands opens for levels 26-31, not 24-29; Razorfen Downs (25+) and Uldaman (30+) open with it. The City of Dalaran stays shut
- The battleground promised for this week is in no note - Blizzard has not said whether it opened, or which one it is
- Feral: Shifting Power and Improved Shifting Power are in the client, Tiger's Fury and King of the Jungle are gone. Hot Streak is now Heating Up, Soul Harvesting is Soul Harvest
- Warrior: Blizzard describes a Fury and Protection rework as "in today's build" - the client trees of 70170 and 70178 do not have it
- Dungeon quests give 50% less bonus experience; PvP gear costs about 50% more honor, and the cap rises to 25,000
- Newly announced, undated: 16 Legacy points for every tester, and a warning on trades with strangers
Changed here: the talent calculator shows build 1.60.1.70170, and shared links carry over. Three new build pages (70124, 70170, 70178), the one for 70170 with its own talent diff and the warrior contradiction. The roadmap, the class deep dives, the Excavation Site, the City of Dalaran, Darkspear Islands and the Legacy system are brought up to 1 October; the dungeon list now knows "not open yet" for dungeons inside the level range that are still shut.
Level 30, one dungeon, one battleground - and four classes in writing
- The beta goes down for maintenance on October 1 and comes back "several hours later" with a new build and the level cap raised to 30 - Blizzard's own date, posted the evening before
- Opening with it: one new dungeon and one battleground, per Blizzard's correction under podcast episode 2. The dungeon is the Excavation Site in the Wetlands (24-29); the City of Dalaran comes in a later beta update. The battleground was not named
- Class deep dives for Hunter, Druid, Priest and Warrior: talents from 10, a new milestone at 16 points, respeccing at a class trainer in a capital, Dual Specialization at 40
- Announced for a later build, not in the client yet: the Feral talent Shifting Power, which replaces Tiger's Fury, and Improved Shifting Power
- Warrior Rage generation has bugs in the beta, which Blizzard says may take a couple of weeks to track down
- Gold buying: Blizzard will increasingly act against buyers' accounts as well as sellers', up to removing the gold and closing accounts
Added here: a page laying the four deep dives over the talent trees we read from the client - they agree almost everywhere, three Feral changes are still to come, and one druid talent has a different name in the article than in the client. The roadmap page now scores last week's guess: the date was right, the dungeon list was not. The Excavation Site and City of Dalaran pages say which of the two opens now.
A week of changes with no client behind them
- No beta client has shipped since 1.60.1.70009 on September 24 - and the data changed anyway, three times on the 26th and again on the 27th, through the hotfix cache instead of a patch
- Items touched in those hotfixes: Classic pieces adjusted (Gizmotron Megachopper, Humbert's Helm, Jurassic Wristguards, Watchman Pauldrons) and new ones added, among them Painwalker Buckler, Mark of the Red Flight and Eternally Frozen Band
- Read out of the files: Rotmender's Raiment, five cloth pieces for a levelling healer with bonuses at two, three, four and five - two of them renamed in place from Frostbane Treads and Wispcloth Leggings while the beta was running
- Still without a date: the level cap rising to 30, the Server Slam, and the additional zones, dungeons and the battleground Blizzard said would open as the test continues
- Reported rather than announced: the quest log doubled to 40 slots, and the beta server capacity was raised a second time after hour-long queues
Added here: a section of its own under /beta, because these pages describe a version that changes under the reader rather than the finished game. Three pages so far - the four promises Blizzard left undated and the guesses that have filled in dates for them, the hotfix gap that lets data move while the build number stands still, and Rotmender's Raiment as the one worked example that sits under the level cap and can therefore actually be checked. Every line in them is marked confirmed, reported or guessed.
First major beta patch
- Build 1.60.1.70009 with development notes from Blizzard itself - the first patch to touch talents and spells
- For the druid, Mangle is now Primal Bite: the debuff that raised bleed damage is gone, so the name no longer fit. Primal Fury is Blood Frenzy again
- For the paladin, "Improved Holy Strike" is removed and its cooldown reduction becomes baseline. Vengeance stacks three times instead of five
- New in the interface: a cooldown manager without an addon - so far for druid, mage, priest, warrior and warlock
- Respeccing costs 1 silver in the beta, more after the first reset, and 1 silver again an hour later
Changed here: all nine trees were rebuilt from the beta client, so the moves and removals are in as well - 466 talents instead of 470. Shared build links survive it: a code now carries its version and an older one is lifted onto the new positions along the talent names. Four new sections came out of this patch: a page per beta build with the talent changes computed from our own snapshots, a page per class listing every talent that differs from Classic 1.12, a levelling atlas of all 44 zones with their dungeons and maps, and five background pages on the Skyborne, the Shen'dralar, the Barrow Deeps, the Al'Aketh and the Forsaken Kingdom campaign. The cooldown manager joined the systems page.
The first dungeons have been cleared
- Hall of Thanes and Ruins of Lordaeron are the only dungeons open at the level 20 cap - and by now they have been run often enough
- Four and five named encounters with mechanics and the trash that matters, from the beta client and from players inside
- In Wailing Caverns the re-itemized Fang set turns a druid's Cat Form into a serpent - two Blizzard developers have commented on it
- Not all of it lines up: one boss carries different names in walkthroughs and in the client, and two different boss rosters circulate for Ruins of Lordaeron
Added here: both dungeon pages now carry their encounters, the quests attached to them, 25 loot rows each marked for how firm it is, and a panel up top saying where it comes from. Plus three Classic dungeons inside the beta level range in a table of their own - with what Forever changed in them. Where sources disagree, the disagreement sits under the open questions.
Legacy laid open, first beta patch
- Blizzard lays out the Legacy system: 65 challenges across six categories, each awarding exactly one point
- It unlocks with your first point, for most players at level 25 - and a single character can reach 29 points, above the spending cap of 16
- All 21 perks are now confirmed by name, seven per tree
- Beta build 1.60.1.69977 brings Mac and controller fixes, no game content
Changed here: the Legacy page now derives the 65 points instead of asserting them, and names the rewards track along with all four rewards. How many points a challenge awards no longer sits there as an open question - it is answered. Also new: a page of its own on the four rulesets.
Beta day one
- Open beta begins, running to 21 October
- Level cap 20, rising to 30 later in the beta - most of the world is untestable
- Every page above the beta reach now carries an untested marker
Changed here: the dungeon list gained a beta-range column, the talent disclaimer switched to its in-beta wording.
Deep dive panel
- Panel on systems and rewards
- The roadmap graphic shows three raid unlocks on 9 December, not two
- Onyxia's Lair is an unlock, not a new raid
Corrected here: the raid section now says raid unlocks; Onyxia's Lair is marked as existing.
Dungeon level ranges
- Nine dungeons listed with level ranges from hands-on reports
- Only Krol'dok Stronghold's range came from Blizzard directly
Added here: nine dungeon pages, all ranges flagged as unofficial.
Reveal
- Forever announced as a third permanent branch, level cap 60 forever
- Four new regions, nine dungeons, the Skyborne race, 470 talents
- Included in an active subscription, not sold separately
This site went live on the reveal.