Part of World of Warcraft: Forever's charm is that combat is considerably slower than the regular version of the MMO. It's the kind of game where you'll spend 38 seconds hitting a scorpion because there are so few buttons to press in the early stages of your journey.
Classes in WoW's past were simple, but had small quirks to them that you'd pick up over time. Melee classes, for example, can squeeze abilities in between their auto attacks to maximize their damage output. You'd never care about this if fights only took 10 seconds, like they do in WoW today, but back then you had to use all that time in more drawn-out battles for something.
The WoW: Forever beta has reminded me how satisfying it is to play a class that isn't built like Whac-A-Mole, where the challenge is to hit the right buttons the moment they start to glow. There's a rhythm to WoW's old classes and I'm delighted to hear that Blizzard fully intends to maintain it in WoW: Forever.
Blizzard developers told TechRadar that they want "to err on the side of simpler classes, but with engaging depth," and that all of it will align with its guiding principle of staying true to the old MMO's "core design, pacing, and tone."
"The level of mechanical complexity found in the beta classes is indicative of our intentions," Blizzard says.
That suggests to me that Blizzard isn't trying to speed up the pace of combat, nor will it look to shore up a class' weaknesses by adding new abilities where there were none before. My level 15 paladin will never graduate out of spending most of her time smacking monsters with a hammer while she waits for her Judgement ability to come back up. I won't ever have so many abilities on my bars that I'll need to refer to an infographic to understand which one to press first.
A strict adherence to the methodical combat of yore also means dungeons and raids will follow suit. Blizzard says encounter design will remain relatively simple so that some of the challenge will be found in preparing for them via gear sets, consumables, and team composition. I am skeptical that this will convince me to go back to farming for crafting items before every raid like I did as an over-achieving teen, but I can still appreciate that someone could take the time to do that again.
All of this makes me excited to see how creative the developers get with items that let WoW's old classes bend the rules a bit. Players have already discovered a sword for mages that deals bonus fire damage on frozen targets, for instance, which opens the door for more opportunities to play classes in ways you would've never seen in WoW's early days. My guess is this is what will ultimately drive players to stick around and make new secondary characters as part of Blizzard's goal to keep progression in WoW: Forever incremental and "horizontal".
