WoW Forever Live Q&A September 17: Every Dev Answer

Blizzard streamed a live World of Warcraft developer Q&A on Thursday, September 17, 2026 on Blizzard's official Warcraft streaming channels. The modern WoW half started at 10:00 a.m. PDT and the WoW Forever half at 10:30 a.m. PDT. The WoW Forever beta opens after the Q&A, runs to October 21, and launch follows on November 4.

This page is our live notebook for the Forever half. Each entry is what a developer said, attributed by name where the stream showed it, with the approximate stream time. Wording in quotation marks is a direct quote from the stream. Everything else is a paraphrase. We add entries as the stream runs and tidy them afterward. A recording is available on the same channels after the broadcast.

The beta window

Beta opens: September 17, 2026, after the Q&A.
Beta closes: October 21, 2026.
Launch: November 4, 2026.

For the rest of the WoW Forever picture from BlizzCon, see our WoW Forever hub.

Modern WoW half (10:00 to 10:30 PDT), quick notes

These came before the Forever segment. Kept short because this page is about Forever.

Character customization: the team said there is "hope" for broader options, naming hairstyles, hair colors, skin and facial features, tattoos, and new option dropdowns on races that never had them. No dates.
Transmog in patch 12.2.5: the cloth, leather, mail and plate rule goes away, so you can transmog across armor types. Class-specific sets stay class-specific. Weapons still require a type your class can wield, so no transmogging a sword into a gun unless you can use guns.
Wrath of the Lich King Remix: chosen because it is mechanically simpler than Legion and the team could remix it harder. Named systems: outbreaks in the open world and in dungeons, infinitely scaling dungeon difficulty, and runeforging for every class. They also mentioned unreleased item appearances and a modern take on Invincible.

Housing (Paul): it keeps growing. New zones bring new furniture cultures, and endeavors will bring those cultures to your neighborhood with quests and decor. Showcases, mannequins, copy and paste, multi-select and buy now are coming in Eclipse. Different house exteriors for different cultures: "we've heard you", nothing to announce yet.
Class complexity in Midnight (Paul): the goal was less complexity, same depth. Outlaw's Roll the Bones was redesigned with clearer breakpoints so you no longer need an addon to decide when to reroll. Evoker's Flameshaper tree was rebuilt around charges and uptime. Restoration Shaman is the one they admit is "still not quite there yet" and is still being iterated.

Fun vendors inside raids: they have been absent because the story tone has been darker, but the team sees no reason not to bring them back and said "we have more raids coming", so the odds went up.
The sword in Silithus: no spoilers, but you can see its tip from the Mantle Vault, Sargeras "barely missed", and the team promised "we are going to be dealing with that sword" and asked players to be prepared.
Tailbound (the roguelite mode): replayability comes from authored levels with a known bestiary, more difficulties unlocked on later clears, and three classes that solve problems differently. Inside a run you find flasks, drafts and potions and level up with Torghast-style choices. Between runs you return to Quill Grave, level 1, and spend spoils with villagers on better starting stats, talent changes, flask variety and potency, and the level-up pool. Whether it stays playable beyond Midnight was asked and the answer was still in progress when this segment ended.

Tailbound runs from patch 12.1.7 through 12.2.5, with all its cosmetic rewards carrying into Midnight in time for Wrath Remix. The team is open to extending or bringing it back based on feedback.
Will Forever's new races, including the Skyborne, come to retail? "Not for the Worldsoul Saga." Never say never beyond that. First name plus surname characters are also not coming to the Worldsoul Saga.
Patch 12.1.5 with the Binding of K'thix raid is on the PTR now. The modern half ended here and the WoW Forever developers came on next.

Live notes

The Forever half went live at about 10:30 a.m. PDT. Host: Randy Jordan (Kaivax) from the community team. Panel: Josh Greenfield, Nora Mills and Tim Jones from the WoW Forever team. The names are as the host said them on stream. The first question was about the Skyborne elves.

Skyborne elves (Josh Greenfield, about 10:31 to 10:36)

Lore: the Skyborne (the Shin'dorei) are cousins of the Quel'dorei and the blood elves, all descended from the ancient Kaldorei nobility. One branch fled across the sea to Quel'Thalas and became dependent on arcane magic. The Skyborne went a different way and ended up in Skywall, in the Elemental Plane, with no Sunwell, so they lean on natural and elemental magic. He pointed to the BlizzCon lore panel for the full path.
Why not Thalassian high elves: "why not both." Quel'Thalas is on the long-term map, but the team's ambitions for it were too big for a starter zone and it was the wrong point in Forever's timeline. Forever dilates the first year of original WoW so the team can follow the original chronology between the big beats like Molten Core, Blackwing Lair and Zul'Gurub. Starting Thalassian high elves in Northshire Abbey was considered and dropped.
Chris Metzen's input was to "spread your wings," and the Skyborne origin in Skywall gives the team hooks to pay off later, with a nod to Thunderfury.
Class combos: Skyborne open up high-elf-looking druids, and shamans on the Horde side, which no high elf race has had before.

Character models, classic mode, realmless (about 10:36 to 10:43, recovered from the VOD)

Classic skeleton option: the HD and SD character models share skeletons, so instead of a separate skeleton the team reworked the animations on both models for a classic feel, including less bouncy dwarf runs, walking, swimming, attacks, spell casts and interactions. They want beta feedback on how it feels.
Classic versus enhanced: at first login you pick a classic or enhanced mode. Classic mode automatically turns off quest tracking and transmog. The SD or HD character toggle sits at the bottom of the customization options at character select and is also in the graphics settings, so it can be flipped anywhere in the world.
How realmless works (Nora Mills): you pick a ruleset, normal, PvP, roleplay or hardcore, instead of a realm, and play with everyone on that ruleset, like a mega realm. Battlegrounds may mix rulesets. There is no hopping between rulesets with one character; it works like a character transfer. Player populations are managed so a location never gets crammed while familiar faces stay familiar.
Server-wide events like the opening of the Gates of Ahn'Qiraj will still feel like a global effort, with the team "intentionally dodgy about AQ." Ahn'Qiraj is not at launch. Hardcore is not at launch either; when it comes it will be a ruleset choice like roleplay or PvP.

Servers, names and GDKP (about 10:43 to 10:48)

Realmless, not regionless (Nora Mills): regions like EU and CN still exist. Oceanic players are hosted on Australian data centers for the most part, can still play with US friends, and share the same ruleset-wide auction house with them. The caveat is ping: if you group with players far away you may connect to their data center.
Surnames are mandatory (Nora Mills): the surname field must be filled. Names are region-wide, so Nora Anyheart on the roleplay ruleset is taken on the PvP ruleset too. The team sees first plus last name as a roleplay-forward way to keep unique names in a realmless world and expects players to build families of characters with them.
GDKP is not allowed in WoW Forever (Josh Greenfield). "No, we are not going to allow GDKP." The reason given is the first design pillar, to nurture and protect social experiences. He separated GDKP from the real-money trading question and said RMT would be addressed too; that answer ran into the next segment.

GDKP reasoning, the economy, gold buyers, add-ons (about 10:48 to 10:53)

Why no GDKP (Josh Greenfield): where it has been popular longest it reaches a level of ubiquity that can overtake the traditional guild structure, and it becomes a barrier to entry for new players who end up buying gold to buy in. He also called GDKP "an excellent way for bad actors to launder large sums of gold," which makes clawing gold back after bans harder.
The economy will be actively managed, as it was in Season of Discovery, with levers on the supply of materials when a phase makes them scarce. The Tarnished Undermine Real system is in WoW Forever, described as "kind of like an Emblem of Justice system," with resource boxes whose drop rates can be tuned.
Gold buyers: "we are going to very aggressively punish gold buyers." He said past enforcement was "probably too lenient" and easy to get around, and that losing a 22-year-old account permanently is not worth it.
Add-on API (Nora Mills): WoW Forever uses the modern Midnight API restrictions, not the Classic ones. Encounters in Forever are simpler, so the combat restrictions should not hurt, and one unified API is easier for add-on authors to keep up with.

Built-in UI, raid sizes, cross-faction (about 10:53 to 10:58)

Built-in tools (Nora Mills): WoW Forever ships a damage meter and a cooldown manager, and "a swing timer perhaps coming soon." The aim is that nobody feels they must download add-ons to play, because add-on dependence creates friction and gatekeeping for new players. Add-ons remain allowed.
Flex raiding (Tim Jones): no. Instead, "every single tier that we will ever do will have both a 10 player raid and a 20 player raid," so two five-player groups can graduate into a 10-player guild and a 10-player guild can approach 20-player content. Tier pieces drop across both. The first raid in the Barrow Deeps has about eight bosses in the 10-player version, and the Hydral raid has more.
40-player raids: Onyxia's Lair is the 40-player raid at launch. There will not be a 40-player raid every tier; Onyxia is the first extra piece alongside the 10 and 20 ecosystems.
Cross-faction play: no. "The Horde and Alliance hate each other. We want to embrace the war in Warcraft." World PvP and battlegrounds are encouraged instead.

One difficulty, transmog, PvP, the podcast (about 10:58 to 11:03)

Dungeons and raids have a single difficulty (Tim Jones): "There's no heroic difficulty." One version of the 10-player raid, one of the 20-player raid, same for dungeons. The armor color variants people spotted are offset pieces, not difficulty tiers. Onyxia's Lair is pitched as the guild get-together in Dustwallow Marsh with extra tier pieces.
Transmog (Josh Greenfield): it preserves your silhouette, so a paladin transmogging a cloth chest needs another cloth chest to mog over it. You can save multiple armor pieces per slot per set, so a healer paladin who picks up a plate chest upgrade sees it swap to the plate appearance they designated. Players who do not care can ignore it entirely.
PvP (Tim Jones): no rated PvP. A re-envisioned ranking system with a PvP track to earn honor and level through, with its own rewards that reset every season or tier, aligned with raid releases. Honor is being adjusted so nobody feels stuck farming Alterac Valley. A new battleground, Darkspear Islands, has its own reputation and progression track, and Warsong Gulch and Arathi Basin are there with "more battlegrounds to come in the future."
A weekly WoW Forever podcast starts next week, hosted by Josh Greenfield and Josh Corbett of Countdown to Classic.