Build 70009: The First Real WoW Forever Beta Patch Notes Have Landed
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Original editorial illustration by RealmList, generated for this article. This is artwork, not game footage or official promotional material.
The September 24 maintenance window was the one the WoW Forever beta was built for. After a week of hotfix-style tweaks and narrowly scoped builds, Blizzard took the beta down for several hours, deployed build 70009, and posted its first full set of development notes — the longest change log of the test so far, and the clearest picture yet of how Forever intends to differ from Classic Era before launch on November 4.
The three changes that matter most
Respecs cost 1 silver (for now). If you have not respecced recently, a talent reset costs 1 silver; the next one costs significantly more, then the price drops back after an hour. Blizzard flagged this as a beta-only, temporary change — its purpose is to let testers experiment with the reworked talent trees freely without establishing the final economy. Do not expect penny respecs at launch.
Campfires finally work the way people assumed they did. You can now receive the campfire buff while sitting, sitting in a chair, sleeping, lying down, or kneeling — and eating, drinking, casting, and crafting no longer interrupt or cancel the buff. For a game whose devs keep framing the journey as the point, making rest stops less of a dead stop is a small change with outsized feel.
Wands are cut off from spell power. Wands no longer scale with your spell damage, and Minor, Lesser, and regular Wizard Oil return to Classic Era values (8/16/24 spell power). This is a quiet but important leveling-economy decision: it closes the caster-dps loop where wand damage rode on gear that was never meant to feed it, and it protects wand-based leveling from being trivialized by spell-power stacking.
Cooldown Manager, version one
The first Cooldown Manager is live. It ships off by default (enable it under Options > Gameplay Enhancement), supports only Druid, Mage, Priest, Warrior, and Warlock, and does not yet handle spell ranks. Blizzard's specific ask in the notes: tell them which spells you want tracked by default. That is an unusual piece of design delegation — the default tracking list will effectively be set by tester consensus.
Gamepad support expanded in the same pass: class flyouts for forms, pets, auras, and stances on Druid, Hunter, Warlock, Paladin, and Warrior; a Compact Action Bar option; and a fix so the pet action bar no longer overlaps the bottom action bar. Controller play remains an alpha-quality but genuinely usable path.
The class-by-class rebalance
The development notes touch every class. The most consequential changes:
| Class | Biggest change in build 70009 |
|---|---|
| Druid | Rejuvenation, Tranquility, and Wild Growth can crit; Wrath base damage up roughly 50%; Mangle renamed Primal Bite |
| Hunter | Pet Furious Howl attack power bonus cut by 40%; Tame Beast no longer works on beasts above your level |
| Mage | Arcane Missiles checks line of sight only at cast start; Wake of Fire cooldown 30s, Hot Streak 20s |
| Paladin | Holy Strike ranks now scale from 25% up to 50% weapon damage; Righteous Fury holy threat reduced from 90% to 60% |
| Priest | Renew can crit; Power Word: Shield overwrites an existing shield when there is no Weakened Soul |
| Rogue | Sapping a PvP-flagged target now flags you too |
| Shaman | Flametongue Totem loses its duration; totems no longer stack — even between different shamans |
| Warlock | Voidwalker Sacrifice scales with 10% of your spell healing |
| Warrior | Protection: Bastion and Focused Rage swapped; Arms: Bloodthrill proc chance doubled, Slam cooldown 18s |
Two racial changes stand out. Gnome's Eureka! becomes a flat 10% resource discount for every class — a genuinely cross-class perk in a game that has been careful about racials — while Tauren Cultivation gains per-herb level requirements, closing the low-level herbalism shortcut. Touch of the Grave no longer breaks crowd control.
Fixes: the good, and what still is not fixed
The build fixes a caster bug where precast animations failed to play (and casters sometimes stood while casting), a memory leak that slowly degraded performance, several Mac water and display bugs, and around twenty quest issues — mostly faster respawns for crowded starting-zone objectives like the Elwynn murlocs.
Three things beta watchers were expecting did not land:
- Increased weather effects remain "coming soon" — the September 23 teaser has not yet produced a change log entry, and the 9/24 notes contain no weather item.
- The four fixes flagged on September 18 as "next build" candidates (Waylaid Crates, Starshards/Twilight Focus, the Vengeance periodic-crit trigger, and the Coldridge Valley map issue) are not explicitly confirmed in the notes as posted, based on the available texts.
- Addon saved-variable persistence — broken since the beta's first days — still is not listed as resolved.
The day after the build, stability wobbled: Kaivax posted on September 25 that Blizzard was tracking issues "affecting some Beta testers" and would restart the servers to deploy stability fixes. If your first hours on 70009 felt rough, that was the reason.
The name crackdown has begun
In a separate September 24 post, Blizzard confirmed it is issuing forced name changes to beta characters violating the naming policy, and has removed beta access entirely for names "far outside" the Code of Conduct. Two details are worth noting: the actions were taken by the development team and reviewed individually — Customer Service will not handle appeals — and an automatic enforcement system is coming shortly, about which Blizzard explicitly asked testers not to probe.
That last line matters for launch. Forever enforces surnames and realm-unique names (per the September Q&A), and automated name enforcement is one of the few pieces of launch infrastructure that can only be tested at scale on a beta. It is now being tested.
Sources and further reading
External references used to verify or expand this article.