I know, I know, "times change". But it sucks that one of the flagship features of vanilla WoW apparently can't be implemented anymore. It's so jarring watching everyone around you disappear and a whole new set of players and mobs load in when you change zones.

started this back in the summer because flying across the eastern kingdoms is like 5 minutes of nothing and i kept alt tabbing to youtube. first version was literally just flappy bird with a gryphon. then 2048. then i kept going and now there's 8 of them:

- flappy gryphon

- 2048 where you merge ores until you forge thunderfury

- match-3 where every match hits hogger (and later onyxia)

- memory with spell icons

- vampire survivors in a duskwood graveyard

- snake but it's a murloc dragging a line of baby murlocs

- goblin car race on the shimmering flats. barrels explode, ice makes you steer like an idiot

- subway surfers in the deeprun tram. you're the rat, monty chases you with his flute

P.S. the menu pops up by itself when you take a flight path (and at the campfire on forever) and stays open after you land so you can finish your run. /games opens it anytime.
also the whole addon is tiny (around 300kb of lua). every model, texture and sound is pulled from the game's own files, so there's nothing extra to download, and it basically does nothing in the background until you actually open a game

works on classic era, tbc, wrath, cata, mists, retail and forever. free on curseforge, search "LF Games".
it's just me working on this so if something is broken on your version or a model looks weird, tell me and i'll fix it. if people are into it i'm thinking about a shared leaderboard across players and a couple of multiplayer games next

https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/lf-games

Gotta hand it to Blizzard, they did an incredible job making it look like you're actually in a living, breathing, open world while you're actually just in small hardly connected instances! Incredible technological feat on display

Just finished a full BFD run where we cleared every single mob in the instance, and 4 out of 5 players still didn't complete two of the loot x number of item quests. One of them requires running the entire dungeon again just to loot a single Twilight Pendant at the end.

I got half a bar of XP in 2.5 hours (this includes travel time and killing every single mob to try and complete the quests), and completed two dungeon quests worth roughly 30% of a level combined. Factoring in forming the group and gathering the quests, that's 3+ hours for 80% of a level from lvl 23->24.

Honestly, with the dungeon mob XP nerfs, dungeons feel like a waste of time unless they have plenty of easy-to-complete quests. Dungeons like BFD, with few quests or quests that require multiple runs, just aren't worth the time anymore.

Is this really the right way?

Further emphasis on this issue from a thread I saw several days ago that got buried, this time with images comparing them in the exact same armor and animation frames for better analysis.

The layering and phasing issues are so out of hand that you arrive on the other side of the loading screen with boats full of strangers. Completely immersion breaking, especially if you are mid-duel :(

We need to go back to servers - the current layering sucks any form of community out of the game, which is one of the pillars of mmo's

It feels bad when I leave a city and the people leaving with me just disappear into the ether. How is that a MMORPG experience?

[Interviewer:]'WoW: Forever' maintains a level cap of 60 while emphasizing 'horizontal progression'. From a player's perspective, however, it might be hard to intuitively grasp how this differs from simply obtaining better gear. What is the core of horizontal progression as the dev team defines it?

Clay Stone: There is an important distinction here. When we talk about 'horizontal', we primarily mean expanding the world itself horizontally.

We can add new zones, dungeons, raids, and quests, as well as deepen professions or expand profession trees. Legacy systems can also be added continuously over time. Broadening the world sideways in this manner is what we mean by horizontal progression.

Looking strictly at gear progression, it isn't entirely horizontal. When a new raid tier is introduced, there will be a degree of power escalation between tiers. However, we aim to keep that power jump as narrow as possible.

https://www.invenglobal.com/articles/26963/post-beta-wow-forever-what-is-the-development-direction

The regular Tauren unit in Warcraft 3 carried a totem the size of a tree trunk and just beat things with it.

Since Forever is leaning a bit more into the Warcraft 3 lore, a two-handed totem for warriors and shamans feels like it would fit right in.

Figured it was worth posting, since I've seen a lot of fuss about this.

I think WoW Forever should add a simple option to mark items in your bags as "do not sell", similar to what Diablo has

You could right-click an item (with a modifier key, for example) to lock it, preventing you from accidentally selling it to a vendor

This would be especially useful for gear you want to keep like alternative sets or items you might need later

It's a small QoL feature that would save a lot of frustration, and I imagine it wouldn't be too difficult to implement

This version of the Halloween event is so iconic but it came out during the Zul'Aman patch in TBC. I don't see any reason why the original WoW Classic Wickerman event couldn't coexist alongside the Headless Horseman in WoW Forever.

Title, would be nice to practice rotations :)

Has anyone talked about how mob scaling on Forever is seemingly greater than SoD?

A lvl 46 mob has more health on Forever than SoD, and SoD had insane levels of power creep.
- Era: 1.7k HP
- Forever: 3.2k HP (88% increase)
- SoD: 2.8k HP (64% increase)

This seems to be broadly applied to all mobs.

Mobs start at roughly the same HP (relative to Era) and quickly start to out scale at later levels.

https://www.twitch.tv/ahlaundoh/clip/ObliviousHappyBasenjiDatSheffy-wszZheYu0YxKJEAF

Seeing players disappear as they enter a different zone does not make the world feel connected. Running into Elwynn Forest with someone you've seen for the last hour only for them to disappear at the zone border is so disheartening and sad. Instead of one giant world, it feels like each zone is a mini world, where players next to you can travel to another dimension and disappear at any moment.

Getting on a boat or zepplin and half of the people disappear after a loading screen does not feel good.

This feels like a regression from what Classic already does. Classic Era uses continent-wide layers. If you’re on a particular layer, that version of the world persists as you travel across zones. Forever’s current zone-by-zone sharding makes the underlying server technology far more visible, ruining immersion. If you are on Layer 2, you will only see people on Layer 2 wherever you go. A layer list that you can only change in capital cities would work great IMO.

The current system hurts the "persistence" of an MMO. This issue causes such a passive disconnection from the world that I feel will hurt Forever's immersion so strongly in the long run, and honestly it's killing my drive to even want to play the game.

The world cannot be the main character if the world doesn’t feel continuous.

In Vanilla WoW Eye of the Storm let you cast without spell pushback after being crit on ALL spells. This is one reason they could still be useful if you put a pet on them though Curse of Tongues made them pretty useless.

https://www.wowhead.com/classic/spell=29062/eye-of-the-storm

The new version is only on offensive spells and only 70 percent.

https://www.wowhead.com/forever/spell=29062/eye-of-the-storm

You could also fit in some heal interruption talents in Elemental which you can no longer do and you can no longer get Nature's Swiftness which was the survival spec if you didn't opt in for Burst Damage and that was also removed.

They didn't just destroy Elemental burst damage, they destroyed it's ability to act as a hybrid for which they are being severely punished by the developers. You are healing two things in PvP with the current state of Elemental Shaman in Forever.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3h3fwaA6-Kg

In addition they removed fire nova totem from the PvP burst rotation which worked on Grenades. You can no longer fit it in with the GCD (and it wouldn't work with a grenade with lburst anyways due to needing a flame shock on). You nova'd grenaded (or warstomped), Ele Mastery CL Earthshock to give you that true one shot potential and all of that is gone.

This spec has been screwed in every way possible. The developer bias here is insane and it seems like it is being severely punished due to how strong windfury totem is and how strong it makes other classes. It feels like 3 v 3 arena balance when that doesn't exist in the game. This sets a very dangerous precedent about what the design teams goals may be. Arena led to homogenization on everything. What's next? Shadow priest damage destroyed cus of dispels and shields? Ret Paladin destroyed due to a macro to dispel their healer in a premade or give warriors freedom?

What is this game designed around? An esport that failed a decade ago that sponsors bailed on to appease some streamers who might have to get a job at McDonald's if they can no longer boost and sell Arena carries (breaking the TOS btw) or the Classic WoW playerbase who wants their class to feel and be unique and that had a niche.

Elemental now has no niche. You would bring a Resto Shaman over them 10 times out of 10 in all content. Enhance will be ok until 60 and then it will be useless as other classes get plate or the control to stunlock. kite them to death.

IF Shamans are being punished for how strong windfury is then lock that deep enhance so they at least bring something and their own niche doesn't get them killed all the time in PvP. Make WF raid wide in PVE raids only, keep it party for enhance in PvP only and give elemental the damage they are supposed to have. I am sure Enhance shamans would like to be brought in PVP and valued for once in old WoW design. They are glass cannons but if they are glass cannons surrounded by plate who they are buffing, maybe someone will throw them a heal because of how valuable they are. Maybe they get to have fun to like Ret will. Maybe they can kill enemies surrounded by the boys who have every reason to stay close. Maybe they can actually live long enough in a BG to reach that mage, priest, resto druid and see the stars align on WF and smile.

I really, really hate the design changes on Feral, adding SL/SL (no one wanted to play against this sh@^), Shaman, Mage, rank 1 spell changes that will not change boosting at all cus they will just do it on a prot paladin and those things lead to bigger errors like ice lance. Does Aggrend live in an echo chamber where no one challenges this crap?

To the rest of the team doing great things. Sorry these bizarre decisions are bringing you down. The graphics changes are awesome, the new dungeons are awesome. Aggrend makes Kathleen Kennedy look like a genius and no I will not apologize. This is the same guy who made SOD a catastrophe with class design and he is doing it again here. They owe us an apology for keeping this guy, not the other way around.

Microsoft please hire people that know wtf they are doing and if someone like Ion is hiring these people for Forever then consider he is doing it for selfish reasons and so that Forever is not a threat to retail. I don't care if any of them "love classic" because this guy doesn't understand anything about classic and how classes even work. This game is a potential goldmine especially in a hardware economy nightmare where no one can even buy mid ranged GPU's anymore. You could become the biggest game in the world the next 2 years. The entire triple a industry might be collapsing and you could be making that prime Classic WoW sub cash.

As it is this game is going to tank and fast. People are not going to like being told they have to be resto on a shaman, Feral druids hate their class, Boomkins hate their class and are punished for some of the same reasons as Ele. GOOD Mages hate what you have done and so does everyone else, Spriests just need to turn 40 and they will become the new complaint over mages, hunter pets are comedy levels of tuning. Who really loves playing with the new changes besides overtuned hunters due to a dumb bow and pet changes and and enhance who don't realize it all falls apart endgame? Rogues are basically unchanged and all good rogues looked at the talent trees saw they could get something now in a certain spec and smiled. So I guess they are happy and Rets and the worst warlocks who think SL/SL should be the spec over affliction or dest.

This isn't Classic + atm. It's Classic FUBAR SOD 2. You didn't surpass 2004 first time design you somehow made it much, much worse.

No amount of influencer positivity due to their revenue stream and social astroturfing is going to hype this into long term success. SOD had level tiers and time gating to keep the hype going. This doesn't. It will be exposed for that it is within a month of release.