WoW Forever sims

The dates that matter

Beta opens

17 September 2026

Epic and Collection packs. Level cap 30 on the roadmap.

Beta ends

21 October 2026

Five weeks of live class data for the sim to be checked against.

Launch

4 November 2026

Worldwide, 3pm Pacific. Level cap 60, included with a subscription.

Tier 1

9 December 2026

First content tier on the announced roadmap.

Sim a Forever class

Nine classes, no new ones. Death Knight, Monk, Demon Hunter and Evoker do not exist in Forever. Each class page covers the new spells, the talent changes, which races can play it now, and what the sim has to model for that class specifically.

• Warrior
• Paladin
• Hunter
• Rogue
• Priest
• Shaman
• Mage
• Warlock
• Druid

What changes for sims

A Forever sim is not a Classic sim with new talent trees pasted in. The deep dive panel described six engine rule changes that alter how gear is valued, and every one of them has to be modelled before a stat weight means anything.

• One hit stat, one crit stat

  Melee, ranged and spell hit are merged into a single hit chance, and the three crit stats merge the same way. A piece of gear with hit on it is worth the same to a Warrior and a Warlock, which changes how loot lists read for hybrids.

• Expertise exists

  Dodge and parry reduction is its own stat rather than a side effect of weapon skill. Weapon skill racials and the old weapon-type talents are gone, so the value of a given weapon no longer depends on your race.

• Bonus healing grants spell damage

  Healing gear is no longer dead weight for damage. This is the change that makes Shadow Priest, Balance Druid and Elemental Shaman gear lists overlap with their healing sets in a way Classic never allowed.

• Periodic damage can crit

  Damage over time effects crit. Affliction Warlock, Shadow Priest and every bleed spec get more value from crit than the Classic sims assumed.

• Racials rebuilt to be unique

  No two races share a passive any more, and weapon skill racials are gone entirely. Race choice becomes a small but real sim input rather than a Human-Sword-Spec foregone conclusion.

• Milestone talents at 11, 16, 21 and 31 points

  A fourth one-point signature talent sits at 16 points in every tree. Most of the later-expansion spells (Lava Burst, Mutilate, Penance and so on) are placed in rows three to seven, so they are available before level 40.

Four buff talents are also baseline now: Blessing of Kings, Divine Spirit, Improved Mark of the Wild, Improved Battle Shout. A raid sim no longer has to ask whether someone in the group spent the points.

The talent rework by the numbers

Blizzard's stated goal is to replace passive percentage talents with ones that change how you play. The demo build at BlizzCon makes that measurable.

New race and class combinations

Six new combos on the original races, and the Skyborne, a new neutral race of Highborne descendants from Zephras Isle. Racials are rebuilt so no two races share a passive, which makes race a real sim input for the first time.

• Human HunterAlliance
• Dwarf ShamanAlliance
• Gnome PriestAlliance
• Orc MageHorde
• Undead PaladinHorde
• Troll WarlockHorde

Skyborne classes: Warrior, Hunter, Rogue, Druid, Shaman (Horde), Mage (Alliance). The race and its starting zone need the Skyborne Heroic pack or higher.

Dungeons, raids and zones

9 new dungeons were announced and 7 have been named. Two new raids ship at launch, sized at 10 and 20 players. Loot tables have not been published, which is the one thing that blocks a Forever droptimizer.

How the Forever sim is being built

The retail sims on MythicSim run SimulationCraft. It has never modelled a Classic client and has no Forever branch, so waiting on it means missing the beta and probably launch. The wowsims project maintains an MIT-licensed Classic engine that already models 1.12 combat in full, and a community Forever conversion of it exists with all nine classes on the new trees, the unified hit and crit rules, dot crits, bonus healing as spell damage, the reworked racials and the Skyborne.

To be clear about credit: the engine is theirs, not ours. MythicSim will run it as a second backend beside SimulationCraft and contribute fixes upstream, with the same one-click front end on top. The order of work is Quick Sim first, then per-spec stat priorities and a trinket board once beta gear data exists, then a droptimizer once the raid loot tables are published. Where the demo build only showed rank one of a multi-rank talent, per-rank scaling is extrapolated and marked as such until beta confirms it.

The retail sims are not affected. Midnight Season 2 boards, droptimizers and stat priorities keep running on the pinned SimulationCraft build as they do today.

Rankings

The retail site's most used pages are the per-spec trinket boards, and Forever gets the same. The Forever trinket hub is up now with every level 60 trinket in the engine and where it comes from; the ranked per-spec boards fill in as verified beta data and Forever item stats land. Stat priorities and best in slot follow from the same sweep.

Common questions