Launch Week Developer Interviews

11:51 The biggest news from World of Warcraft: Forever's launch-week interviews is about the raids of Dec 9, 2026: "the tier one set is split across all three," Kris Zierhut told Crix, so "if you want to finish your set, you're going to have to go to all three", the 10-player Barrow Deeps, the 20-player Hyjal Summit and the 40-player Onyxia's Lair. Three creators published interviews with Forever's designers on Nov 6, 2026, recorded about a day after the Nov 4 launch: Crix with principal game designer Kris Zierhut and lead Classic designer Tim Jones, MrGM with Zierhut and senior game designer Josh Greenfield, and Joardee with Greenfield and Jones. This page collects what they said that Blizzard has not written down anywhere else. Everything here is a developer speaking, not a patch note, and they said more than once that plans can change.

The three interviews

How the launch went, in their words

1:06 "It is exceeding expectations on all fronts," the developers told Crix, 22 hours in: not perfect, but "95% of the way there", with the longest wait to get in "around 5 minutes, if that". Their one admitted mistake was spreading players too thin across copies of each zone, which made starting areas feel empty after the first minutes; they said they were turning the numbers up so that "each day the world will feel more and more full". Blizzard then lowered them again in congested zones on Nov 9 (Hotfixes and Patch Notes).

Raids: rewards

12:36 Item level is "pretty level" across the three raid sizes, so a 20-player raid gives no "substantial power advantage" over 10-player raiding. Zierhut's reason: raid size "doesn't really change how hard encounters are for the players in the raid. It changes how hard it is for the raid leader and the organizers", so better loot for more players makes no sense. A group that only does the 10-player raid can "get a lot of loot" but cannot finish its set.

28:31 Every raid boss also has "some lower chance to drop chase items", Zierhut told MrGM, some "highly optimized" and some "literally a higher item level", and gear from later raids will be a smaller step up than players expect, "not even as steep as Classic Era". His model is The Burning Crusade, when guilds ran Karazhan and Gruul's Lair while working on Black Temple. Greenfield added that it might be ten items across a raid, not one trinket.

14:42 Progression will not be perfectly flat, though. "I don't think there's a world where we'll ever have purely flat item level progression," Greenfield told Joardee; with four tiers out, flat loot would leave players needing something from every old raid every week. "There will be some sort of upward slope."

12:28 Onyxia "is going to drop a lot of loot", Jones said, more than a 20-player boss; asked if that meant double, he answered "maybe". Blizzard expects guilds to pair up or bring outsiders at first and then try the dragon with 35 or 30 players, and it will not tune her so high that this is impossible.

Raids: difficulty

17:28 "The difficulty we aim for is sort of the typical Naxxramas encounter. Not the hard ones," Zierhut told MrGM: harder than Molten Core, which "was a little too easy", and not as hard as the Four Horsemen. Greenfield added that fights will not be over in 45 seconds as many were in 2019's Classic: long enough that a racial cooldown comes up more than once.

21:04 Jones gave Crix the same target from the other side: Season of Discovery was "a step too far towards modern encounter design and complexity", and the model is Season of Mastery and "baseline Naxxramas". A group that has its pre-raid gear and "a vague idea of what the bosses do" should "see a moderate amount of success" without much stress, with harder "aspirational encounters", secrets and legendary questlines on top.

7:41 Asked how long an average guild should need to clear the first tier, Jones said "somewhere between two to three weeks of progression", while the best guilds may finish in the first week.

9:51 There will be one difficulty. Jones called Ulduar's hard modes "really cool" but "the beginning of" splitting a raid into normal and heroic; in Forever "everyone is fighting the same version of the same bosses", and guilds make their own challenges by going faster or with fewer players. Hidden bosses and secret phases are possible inside that rule.

MrGM's interview adds that boss mechanics are locked away from addons, so that encounters never need them, and that the Barrow Deeps is "more like Karazhan" than Upper Blackrock Spire: not something to walk into blind with strangers in the first week.

Raids: layout, opening and attunements

25:56 Hyjal Summit is open in shape: "once you beat the first boss, there are three paths that open. So three wings," Jones said, and all three must be cleared to enter the last part of the raid. The Barrow Deeps has three entrances, "in Winterspring, Hyjal, and in one of our dungeons", and each leads to a different section; every section can be reached from any entrance.

14:06 The raids open for every region at the same moment. Asked whether Europe would wait behind North America on Dec 9, Greenfield said: "Nope. We're going to do a global launch."

26:56 Attunements will come back "intermittently, not too heavily". Zierhut called Onyxia's "a really cool attunement story" and Karazhan's a good one, and said the chains for Tempest Keep and the original Mount Hyjal went too far: Karazhan is "the upper limit".

13:34 On stacking classes in a 10-player raid, Zierhut listed what was changed so nobody has to: most Shaman buff totems are raid-wide, all raid buffs last an hour, Blessing of Salvation is gone (its threat is built into the three tanks) and Blessing of Light became a deep Holy talent. A 20-player raid "can get all of the 'required' buffs with 10 people", he said, so the other ten places are free.

Old raids, new raids and the pace of updates

25:14 "The roadmap calls for two big content updates, each about four months out from each other," the developers told Crix, and each is planned to bring a 10-player and a 20-player raid, outdoor content and quests. 40-player raids "won't necessarily be a part of every single content release".

2:08 The old raids will arrive slowly. Greenfield told Joardee the team plans to use Molten Core, Blackwing Lair and the rest as "narrative anchors", "most likely" in their original order but possibly "months or years apart", with new raids in between, because Forever is the first year of the game "ultra time dilated".

23:39 They will not come back unchanged. "We want to surprise and delight people. So, how do we do that in a setting like Molten Core?" Jones asked, naming the layout and the bosses as things that could differ; the team is "starting to explore" this and is not ready to share it. Zierhut called Molten Core "a little bit too one note", elementals and fire resistance throughout. See Original Dungeons and Raids.

17:03 Old raids may get shortcuts once they are no longer the newest tier, Jones said, like the orb that later took Naxxramas raiders straight to its last bosses, so that a guild can go back for one item without clearing everything.

Hidden loot and test realms

20:58 Forever's loot from level 30 to 60 was invisible to dataminers because of a flag: an item so marked "doesn't go into the client database until somebody gets it", Zierhut said. "We're going to keep doing it every time we make new dungeons, raids." He wants "the unsolved game", where players do not know the best items or rotations in advance. Asked whether that makes tier lists wrong, he said: "They are often sus." See Class Tier List.

21:52 A public test realm is "very likely" before major updates, Greenfield said, for stability and unglamorous technical code, but "I'm pretty sure" raids will not be on it, and some questlines will be hidden too. "Never say never," he added.

The world: Gilneas, Shen'dralas and the Skyborne

10:02 Gilneas is in Forever's world already, behind its wall. MrGM had found that the land beyond the Greymane Wall, empty in the original game, is now the Cataclysm-era version of the zone, blended into the old terrain. Greenfield confirmed it: "it is kind of just the Cataclysm version, but we plan to do a lot of different things with it once we get there. There's a reason why we kind of put a no man's land around it and we don't really want you to go there yet." Blizzard wanted players on the new boat from Southshore to Auberdine to see its spires and think "I'm going to go there someday". We predicted before launch that Gilneas is the new area of the spring update (Predictions); this is the first time a developer has said the team plans to go there, though not when.

5:00 Zierhut's tip for story hunters was the Skyborne: "they aren't just an island in Skywall", and there is "a much deeper history" around southern Desolace and Dire Maul. "When you go to Shen'dralas, pay attention to who you're talking to", because it "will matter in the future". See Shen'dralas.

24:42 The lines Blizzard says it will not cross were repeated: no flying mounts, no rated arenas and no shared tagging of monsters. The empty spaces of the old map were filled in "as if you could fly", Greenfield said earlier in the interview, only because the new lighting lets players see so far.

10:43 One feature was cut long before launch: weather that matters. The team improved rain, dust storms and blizzards and wanted "something in the game world" to change with them, even "a group of Shamans" changing the weather together, but did not find a design in time. "It's something we want to explore in the future," Zierhut said.

The economy: the Black Market Auction House

11:47 Forever has a Black Market Auction House, in Powderfuse Port (The Riverglades), and Zierhut explained it as a place for gold to leave the game: players are "walking printing presses", and without sinks prices inflate forever. At launch it is deliberately modest, "a few mounts and a few pets" and mostly dungeon items that refuse to drop, including the dungeon set pieces needed for Lord Valthalak's quest, which earns a Legacy point. A second vendor sells rare materials, Black Lotus among them, for a fixed gold price, which acts as a ceiling: when a reagent's price "would just go crazy" in Classic Era, Blizzard's only fix was to spawn more. Some mounts shown in the beta are gone from it. See Gold Guide.

Classes and PvP

Zierhut's remarks on Enhancement Shamans in cloth, fragile Voidwalkers and Wrack became Blizzard's tuning plan for Nov 10 the same day; that plan and the promised look at Shaman and Druid talents early in 2027 are on Hotfixes and Patch Notes.

27:28 PvP balance will stay loose on purpose. Zierhut said balance "started to get really tight and narrow once we had rated arenas"; before that it was about "what can you contribute to the battleground team". As long as battlegrounds stay "a centerpiece" and not arenas or duels, classes can stay different. His example: the Frost Mage's 31-point talent, which adds 20% Frost damage, can be dispelled, so it helps in dungeons and has a counter in PvP.

28:47 For players who arrive in a later PvP season, honor gear is the catch-up: it is "fairly easy to access", and "you actually have to buy that honor gear to get the epic gear. You have to convert it." See PvP Progression.

Our take

We think the split tier set is the most important thing in these interviews, and the least popular: it makes the 40-player Onyxia raid a weekly duty for every guild that wants a full set, in a game whose own designers say 10 and 20 are its real raid sizes. We expect Blizzard to keep the split for the first tier and to leave the 40-player raid out of the second tier's set, which the developers' four-month pace puts around April 2027. Confidence: Possible. Check by: May 2027.

Sources

• WoW Forever Dev Interview: NEW Raid Info + Shaman & Warlock Fixes?, Crix Forever, with Kris Zierhut and Tim Jones, Nov 6, 2026 (video)
• WoW Forever Developer Interview with Kris Zierhut & Josh Greenfield, MrGM, Nov 6, 2026 (video)
• NEW RAID INFO REVEALED - World of Warcraft: Forever Launch Interview with the Devs!, Joardee, with Josh Greenfield and Tim Jones, Nov 6, 2026 (video)
• Raid Rewards and PvP Balance - Crix Interview on WoW: Forever, Black Market Auction House, Global Raid Launch, Quest Helpers - MrGM Interview on WoW: Forever and Everything About WoW: Forever Raids - Joardee Interview on WoW: Forever, Wowhead (Squishei), Nov 6 to 8, 2026, used for the developers' names and the spelling of terms
• Class Tuning Incoming - November 10, Blizzard Entertainment (Kaivax), World of Warcraft forums, Nov 6, 2026