Original editorial illustration by RealmList, generated for this article. This is artwork, not game footage or official promotional material.

For four days the World of Warcraft: Forever beta has been answering its own questions in the client. On September 22 Blizzard started answering them in writing: first with a full race-and-class breakdown on the official news feed, then with a companion post introducing the expansion's new playable race. Together they are the most concrete design document Forever has published since the BlizzCon reveal.

They are also narrower than the headline suggests. Forever ships nine classes, the same nine that shipped on November 23, 2004, and the news is not what was added — it is who is now allowed to be what.

Two subsequent development-notes posts have now rewritten the racial half of this document twice. Everything below reflects the October 26 state; the September 22 numbers that started this article are marked where they moved.

Update — October 26: the final racial pass, 17 hours before name reservation

Kaivax added a "final pass" on racial abilities to the Forever beta development notes at 20:35 UTC on October 26, 2026, and followed it at 15:37 UTC on October 27 with two lines that had been left out of the first list. It is the second rework of the same traits in eleven days, and it landed after the beta had already shut down — one day before eligible players begin locking in race, faction and name for good.

Blizzard's reasoning, in its own words, is a reversal of the September direction:

In taking a final pass on these, we've prioritized racial identity, which means that some races will naturally be slightly more effective than others at certain combat roles. In some places where we had replaced role- or class-focused racials with generic ones, we're rolling those changes back. One exception to this is the weapon specialization racials, like humans' Sword Specialization or orcs' Axe Specialization. While those have a strong fantasy component to them, it is not healthy in the long run for future raid and dungeon loot tables to be evaluated through the lens of "required" weapon types.

The full change list, with the two October 27 additions folded in:

Night Elf, Gnome, Troll and the rest of the Undead kit were not touched in this pass.

Three things worth pulling out

The weapon specializations are gone for good. The October 15 build replaced Sword, Mace and Axe Specialization with flat crit racials; this pass removes two of those three replacements and says outright why weapon racials are not coming back. Whatever you thought the September table meant, the "caster weapon specialization" reading no longer applies to anything.

Tauren traded its only offensive passive for the biggest number in the game. Endurance is now +5% Health and nothing else, which leaves Tauren as the one race with no offensive passive at all. In exchange, Plainsrunning caps at +60% run speed — double the old maximum — but it no longer touches mounted speed, and Blizzard had already made it require continuous movement to keep building. WoWSoD Pro's read is that the real complaint in the reaction threads is faction direction, not the spread: their summary of the largest feedback post notes the gap from best race to worst is under 2% damage, but that both October passes moved Horde down and Alliance up on the eve of players locking in a faction.

The Skyborne's signature abilities became short cooldowns with long location buffs. Read Leyline and Skysight went from long-duration, location-gated effects to 15-second actives whose real value is a one-hour Attuned or Charged state you pick up at a Ley Line or an elemental convergence. Blizzard also increased the number of convergence and Ley Line spawn locations across Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor zones in the October 15 build. Neither state survives entering a raid.

What nobody can test

The beta closed on October 23. None of these numbers will have been played before launch on November 4, and the new Skyborne and Tauren mechanics in particular have never been run in a live environment. WoWSoD Pro reports the first reaction thread passed 300 posts within ten hours, that a "can we have a brief beta test?" request went unanswered, and that the development-notes post was the only official word on the subject as of the morning of October 27.

That is the practical advice for anyone reserving a name this week: pick the race you want to look at for a few hundred hours. Blizzard has now changed these traits on September 24, October 15 and October 26, and the passives will move again after launch.

The new combinations, by name

Blizzard lists them directly rather than leaving players to read the grid: Orc Mages, Troll Warlocks, Undead Paladins, Human Hunters, Gnome Priests, Dwarf Shamans, plus the debut of the Skyborne race.

Read that list as a statement of design intent. Every entry takes a combination that Classic treated as the defining trait of a race's fantasy — the pious human, the axe-swinging orc, the tinker gnome, the shamanic dwarf — and opens it up. Two of them, Dwarf Shaman and Undead Paladin, are exactly the combinations private servers have been shipping for years under names like "expanded race and class combinations," which is worth noting for anyone who has played on one: Forever's version of that idea is now first-party.

The nine classes are Druid, Hunter, Mage, Paladin, Priest, Rogue, Shaman, Warlock and Warrior. Not every race can be every one of them, and the published article's grid is not a clean read at a glance — Alliance races appear to be pointed at Dwarf, Gnome, Human, Night Elf and Skyborne, Horde at Orc, Tauren, Troll, Undead and Skyborne. There is no Death Knight, Monk, Demon Hunter or Evoker, no Draenei, Blood Elf, Goblin or Worgen, and no second new race beyond the Skyborne. Forever is drawn from the original box, deliberately.

The Skyborne are two races wearing one name

The Skyborne — shen'dorei, "hidden people" — are not a single faction you pick at character creation. They split along the same line the rest of the game does:

Two factions, and exactly one class each. That is a much smaller footprint than a new race usually gets, and it means "I want to play a Skyborne" is really two separate decisions: which side of the war, and therefore which of two very different classes.

Their journey starts on Zephras Isle, a level 1–12 experience that Blizzard describes as blending classic Warcraft aesthetics with elemental architecture — the same island that has been generating beta bug reports all week.

The racial traits, with numbers

This is the part worth keeping. Blizzard has published every racial trait for both factions, and the values below are the October 26, 2026 state. Starting with the Horde:

And the Alliance:

What the two rewrites actually changed

The weapon specializations came and went in eleven days. In the original game, Axe, Mace and Sword Specialization were melee crit. In the September 22 article they read as "increase spell and ability critical chance," which is what made an Orc Mage or a Dwarf Shaman look viable. The October 15 build deleted all three and replaced them with Ruthless, Earth Fury and Savage; the October 26 pass deleted two of those three and wrote the policy down. The weapon racials are not returning.

Two races got traits built for a settled world. Tauren Plainsrunning and Cultivation (free herbs without the profession) are not combat racials. They are quality-of-life racials — travel and gathering — which fits Forever's stated philosophy of keeping level 60 relevant forever rather than racing past it. Gnome's Eureka! belongs to the same family: a short, repeatable burst, not a two-minute cooldown. The October pass pushed Tauren further down that road by removing its last offensive passive at the same time as it doubled Plainsrunning.

Nothing defensive was taken away. Will of the Forsaken still breaks Charm, Fear and Sleep. Will to Survive still removes stuns. Stoneform still clears bleeds, poisons and diseases. Hardiness still cuts stun duration by 20%. Two rewrites expanded options and moved numbers around; they did not remove the escape hatches that PvP depends on.

The community read on the September version was consistent from the day the beta opened. Infinite Start's launch write-up made the point bluntly: Undead are among the weakest races in modern retail because of their racials, and Forever's retained and amplified Touch of the Grave makes them desirable in every role. On paper, the same argument applied to Troll Warlocks and Orc Mages — and the October 26 pass weakened the Orc half of that while leaving Undead's trigger alone apart from a shorter internal cooldown.

What this does not settle

• The grid is not a promise. We are reporting the combinations Blizzard named in prose. If you want to confirm that a specific race-and-class pair is legal, the authoritative source is character creation in the client, not a table in a news post.
• The Skyborne cost money. Access to the race is tied to the upgrade purchase rather than the base subscription. That matters more than it did in September: Early Name Reservation, which opens October 27, is also gated behind the Skyborne Heroic Pack, Skyborne Epic Pack or the Warcraft Forever Collection, and a plain subscription does not qualify.
• These numbers have never been played. The beta closed October 23 and the final pass was published three days later. Treat the table as Blizzard's intended launch state, not as a measured one.
• They will move again. Forever has now retuned racials three times in five weeks. Every value here can still change, before or after launch.

The larger takeaway is about what Forever is willing to change. The original game's racials were a closed system: they described the fantasy of a race and priced it accordingly, which is why Undead and Troll players spent years arguing about which was worse. Forever has kept the flavours, rewritten the exchange rate twice, published the whole ledger in public — and then changed it again the night before players were asked to commit.