Blizzard took the WoW: Forever beta offline on Thursday for what lead game producer Kyle Heartline described in a blue post as a full weekly update, Wowhead reported. The build that followed brought the Cooldown Manager, a long list of class changes and a temporary cut to talent reset costs.
Wowhead said Heartline warned the servers would likely be down for a few hours and advised players not to spam the login screen.
Cooldown Manager comes over from Retail
The Cooldown Manager was added in Patch 12.0 with the Midnight expansion as a result of the addon disarmament, and Wowhead reported that it can be ported to WoW: Forever because that version runs the same client under the same addon restrictions as Retail.
In this build it is testable for Druids, Mages, Priests, Warriors and Warlocks, with more classes to follow in later updates. It is disabled by default; Wowhead said players enable it under Options and Advanced Options, reposition tracked spells in Edit Mode, and use the /cdm command to choose which spells are shown. Blizzard said spell ranks are not yet supported and that the feedback it most wants is which spells players expect to be tracked by default.
Respec costs, class changes and the Gnome racial
Blizzard cut the cost of a talent reset to 1 silver for players who have not recently changed talents. Wowhead reported the discount is beta-only: after a reset the next respec costs five gold, dropping back to 1 silver once an hour has passed.
The class notes run long. Among the Druid changes, Rejuvenation, Tranquility and Wild Growth can now land critical hits, Wrath's base damage rose by around 50%, and Feral's Mangle was renamed Primal Bite after its signature debuff was removed. Hunter pets lost 40% of the attack power bonus on Furious Howl, and Survival's Strider Kick now increases movement speed by 30% for three seconds.
The build also nerfed the Gnome racial Eureka!, which Wowhead said players had flagged as overtuned. Each class available to Gnomes had its own version reducing mana, rage or energy costs - up to 50% for Mage - and all variants were reduced to a flat 10%.
Blizzard updated the beta's known issues alongside the build, Wowhead reported. It listed as resolved a Sentinel in the Teldrassil quest "Escaping Ban'ethil" running too fast and spamming her Strike ability, and the Loch Modan quest "Snowbound" awarding more XP than intended, both fixed in the next beta build. Outstanding issues include Cooldown Manager tracking gaps for Healthstones, Arcane Blast, pet cooldowns and item enhancements, display faults on the Stormwind minimap, and party composition changes moving players to a different world instance.
