In a recent interview with MMORPG.com, Jeff Parrot and Josh Greenfield sat down with MMORPG.com to reveal some major announcements for World of Warcraft: Forever. In this article, we break down how Blizzard plans to make discovery a major part of Forever's core.
No PTR?
Outside of this new Beta coming out for WoW: Forever, it appears Blizzard has no plans to have PTR's for new raid content, as Josh Greenfield (Aggrend) stated:
"You won't know what raid bosses you're going to fight until you go in for the first time. There's not going to be a dungeon journal telling you what to do right at first. And I think for some classic players, that's going to be an adjustment, right?"
This is something players in Modern World of Warcraft have often expressed interest in. Outside of Scarlet Enclave in Season of Discovery, when was the last time players truly got to go into a new raid fully blind, with no prior knowledge of the raid?
New Datamining Restrictions
Along with no raid testing, Blizzard is now attempting to restrict players from even knowing what gear will be available in raids and new dungeons until the item actually drops! Aggrend told MMORPG.com:
"Oh boy! So I have something to tell you. One of the things we're doing is we're actually obfuscating all items in the game. So you will not see an item's stats until it drops for you, until it drops for someone on your server. So that means you will not go into the first raid tier knowing what your bis list is. The first week will be the Wild West of people getting items and going up on Wowhead or whatever. That has a transformative effect on that early meta. There's a degree of players will discover things, and they will write guides, and there will be bis lists, and there will be kind of like a meta. But I think one of the things we're committed to doing is continuing to kind of shake that up."
Again, this is a new adjustment to World of Warcraft players. Often, we check our favorite guide website to see what we want to prepare for next for whatever new raid is coming out, both in Retail and Classic WoW. Now, in WoW Forever, we will only find out AFTER every piece of gear possible drops off every boss. For players who truly want that authentic "first time" playthrough, WoW Forever seems to offer just that!
