The World of Warcraft: Forever beta received a new client build on the evening of September 22 Pacific — early on September 23 for anyone in Europe. WoW Forever 1.60.1 Build 69977 arrived with a changelog three lines long, and one of those lines is the largest single fix the beta has shipped.

Blizzard's post, from community manager Kaivax, reads in full:

"A few moments ago, we made a new client build available to Beta testers: WoW Forever 1.60.1 Build 69977 Exit the Beta, go to your Battle.net App, and update your client to this new build to test fixes for:

• Fixed some display issues and stability issues on Macs.
• Controller navigation should now work more properly in the character selection screen if you launch with gamepad active.
• You can now interact with items that give you quests on gamepad.

This client build also includes other fixes for issues that are not testable in-game. Our next full weekly update is coming on September 24."

That last line is the important one for this week. Everything below is what has actually been verified against 69977 by testers, and what has not.

What the Mac fix actually fixed

Since the beta opened on September 17, Apple Silicon Macs have been hanging the GPU on Enter World and rebooting the entire machine — a full kernel panic, not a crash-to-desktop. The largest single thread on the issue ran to 151 replies, and it is the problem our Mac crash guide was written around.

That is fixed. The tester who compiled the definitive list — eight separate Mac graphics faults, each isolated to one setting with its own reproduction steps, and whom Kaivax thanked by name on September 22 — re-ran the entire list against 69977 and found Secondary Lighting at High now loads and plays. Secondary Lighting above Fair was the exact trigger for the panic.

Alongside that, three other results from the same re-test and from the build's own thread:

• The banding on trunks and walls attributed to Optional GPU Features appears to be gone.
• All four Compatibility Settings can now be enabled, where two of them previously had to stay off.
• Three further Mac testers confirmed Secondary Lighting no longer crashes, one of them on an M1 MacBook Pro with 8 GB of RAM on macOS 27.

One reply to the build announcement summarises the change better than any list: "And I'm actually in the game with my Mac on default graphic settings!!! Huge!"

What survived the build

This is the part worth reading slowly, because "fixed some display issues and stability issues on Macs" is doing a lot of work in one sentence, and several visible bugs were not in its scope.

The pattern is consistent: the fix addressed the crash, not the rendering pipeline. Nothing in the notes claims otherwise, and no one should read 69977 as the end of Mac issues in this beta.

Eight items are still in limbo

Blizzard's September 18 known-issues list tagged a set of items as "fixed in the next Beta build." Kaivax did not mention any of them in the 69977 post, and testers in the thread did not report them fixed. That list includes:

• Waylaid Crates
• Starshards not gaining Twilight Focus
• Vengeance proccing from periodic critical strikes
• The Coldridge Valley map reveal

If those fixes exist, the September 24 weekly update is now the most likely place for them. That is also the point at which this beta shifts from "client patch" mode into its first scheduled maintenance window.

What did not get fixed either: addon settings

The most-asked question in the build thread was whether addons can save their settings yet. It was answered within minutes by a tester: "no, i just tested and the same issues appear to still be present on the new build."

This is the universal addon bug our beta addon survey covered — every addon's saved variables fail to persist across a restart. It is not a Mac issue and it is not in any published notes, and it remains the single most disruptive defect for anyone trying to play the beta seriously over a month.

Gamepad, still in alpha

The two gamepad changes are narrow and specific, which is exactly what you want to see in a feature that has been publicly described as alpha:

• Character-select navigation now works properly if you launch with a gamepad active.
• You can interact with items that grant quests using a gamepad.

Neither closes the gap between "playable" and "supported." They are the two most obvious blockers at the login screen and in the first ten minutes of a new character, and they were fixed in that order.

Also in the same window

Three other changes landed around the build without patch notes of their own:

Hunter auto-shoot is bugged in your favour — for now. The 0.5-second cast time that is supposed to apply before an auto-shot or a wand attack is not working, so both fire with a much shorter delay than intended. Hunters and wand users do not have to stand still for as long as designed. Blizzard has confirmed the bug and says it will be fixed in an upcoming beta build, "hopefully next week" — meaning the advantage is temporary and the fix is not in 69977.

Weather is being turned up. Blizzard has shown off improved and increased weather effects with a focus on rain, in a showcase that reads as noticeably better in both sound and image. No date, only "soon."

Forsaken Paladins are getting their lore corrected. The new Undead Paladin combination has an obvious problem built into it: Holy Light is meant to burn the Undead, and the player is the Undead. On the level 2 introduction quest that teaches you to cast it, the spell is supposed to damage you — it currently does not. Developer Josh Greenfield (Aggrend) confirmed the fix is coming: "It should be 100% more metal in the next beta build."

If you are updating right now

Two practical notes from the thread. The update itself is a 67 GB download, and at least one tester hit error BLZBNTAGT0000138F and needed to go into macOS System Settings → Privacy & Security → App Management and add the Battle.net app before the download would run. If the launcher insists the game is running, ending the hanging wow process in Activity Monitor is the fix that worked for another. The build number shows in the bottom-left of the login screen, which is how you confirm you are actually on 69977.

The read on this build is that it did the one thing that mattered — it made the beta usable on a whole class of machines that could otherwise have been locked out before the cap rises to 30 — and left the cosmetic rendering work for the weekly cadence. Watch September 24 for the eight tagged fixes and the first real maintenance pass.