Two days after launch, WoW: Forever received its first full hotfix batch since going live. Kaivax posted it on the official forums at 02:34 UTC on November 6 (dated "November 5" in Blizzard's usual Pacific-time convention, and appearing on the EU forum at 02:35 UTC). On the retail side, the same day carried a separate hotfix post for Midnight — plus a raid tuning announcement for The Venomous Abyss that goes beyond what was live when we checked.

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

The headline fix: Plainsrunning can no longer be stacked

The one PvP entry is the most consequential change in the batch. At launch, Plainsrunning — the Tauren racial that builds movement speed while running — could be stacked during a battleground's preparation phase. Because preparation is a frozen countdown before the gates open, players could pre-build the racial's speed bonus repeatedly and then enter the match already moving far faster than anyone else could.

The fix has two parts, both now live:

• Plainsrunning can no longer stack during the preparation phase.
• Any existing stacks are cancelled the moment a player picks up a flag, so a stacked Tauren cannot be used as a flag-carrying rocket in Warsong Gulch.

This is exactly the kind of launch-window exploit that classic-era servers have struggled with for years, and Blizzard patched it in under 48 hours. If you are levelling a Tauren for the speed bonus, the racial still works normally while running — only the pre-match stacking is gone.

The rest of the Forever list: broken quest NPCs on the 1-60 route

Everything else in the Forever post is about the levelling experience, and it reads like a to-do list of things that were blocking or degrading the 1-60 journey:

Two entries deserve a second look if you are playing a Druid or a crafting character. A class trainer that cannot train is a hard blocker on the class — Lotheluum Starbreeze offering Druid training "as expected" implies that Skyborne or Zephras-area Druids could previously be stuck without access. And the Mild Spices vendor-value cut from 2 copper to 1 is a small economy signal: it is the difference between a vendor-buyable cooking material being a zero-cost bulk commodity and a trivially farmable one.

What these notes do not say

The list contains nothing about the two launch problems players were promised follow-ups on: the layer-density tweak Aggrend said would ship "tomorrow" (November 5 Pacific) after the empty-capitals reports, and the proper boat and zeppelin fix that was supposed to replace the temporary dock portals "in the morning". Neither appears in the November 5 hotfix notes, and we found no official post confirming either had shipped by the time of writing. The faction lock also remains absent from the Known Issues thread. Absence here is not evidence nothing happened — hotfix lists are issue lists, not changelogs of intent — but as of this post, the launch's three biggest complaints still have no published resolution.

The same day, on retail: a sweeping Venomous Abyss nerf pass

Blizzard's retail hotfixes for November 5 (published on the same rolling hotfixes page that carries the Forever notes) included a large tuning pass on Midnight's current raid, The Venomous Abyss. The most eye-catching number: Malevolent Resonance on The Coiled Altar now deals 60% less damage — the largest single reduction in the batch, on the boss that took Team Liquid 310 pulls to kill for the world-first Mythic during the Race to World First.

The full live list:

There was also a delves fix (Shadowguard Point: leaving a "Basilisk Blitz" variant mid-waygate could change your appearance and make friendly units hostile) and, the cosmetic oddity of the day: several Tortollan NPCs had their names updated. Player threads immediately noticed that two of the three renamed Venomous Abyss bosses went from "Iku" and "Nama" to "Epu" and "Nema"; speculation about why is exactly that — speculation, unconfirmed by Blizzard.

For players still progressing on the Coiled Altar, the shape of the pass matters as much as the numbers: nothing mechanical is removed, but several simultaneous pressure sources shrink at once. Fewer Soulcoilers means less positioning load; longer Soul Fragment windows and a 60% damage cut to Malevolent Resonance both soften the phases where healers were most strained.

Announced but not yet live when we checked

A separate blue post blue-tracked by MMO-Champion ("The Venomous Abyss Raid Tuning Incoming") announces further changes over the next few days, beyond the hotfixes above:

• Vashnik, the Malignant: Malignance damage −37% on Mythic; Malignance damage-over-time duration reduced to 16 seconds on Mythic
• Ula'tek: health reduced by 15% on Heroic; Unchecked Rage damage −61% on all difficulties; health scaling on Blightsclae Rawling, Blightscale Viper, Blightscale Shrieker and Weakened Doomscale adjusted on Raid Finder, Normal and Heroic so smaller raid sizes are accounted for and larger raids no longer inflate health

That last item is a direct continuation of the raid-size-scaling problem we have been tracking since September — our Ula'tek tuning trajectory article covers the four earlier passes on the same encounter. This would be the fifth. We could not pull the original tuning thread through the US forum search API, so the "incoming" items rest on the MMO-Champion blue tracker text; they were not yet present in the live hotfix notes at verification time, and the post itself says updates will follow when they go live.

Update — November 7: a second, longer hotfix batch landed

Blizzard appended a full second batch to the same official thread (2403040) — posted at 01:07 UTC on November 7 and dated "November 6" — and it is roughly three times the size of the first. The highlights:

Two observations. First, the Voidwalker health bump is the only outright power change in the batch — everything else is repairs — and it prefigures the first class balance pass announced for November 10. Second, the world-wide visibility improvement ("other players and their targets across relatively large distances") directly addresses the empty-feeling-world complaints from launch day; it is the closest thing the notes offer to the layer-density tweak Aggrend promised, though it is not labeled as such.

The November 6 batch still contains no boat or zeppelin fix — the temporary dock portals remain the official answer to lost ships as of this update.