Forever Beta Update Three: Dalaran Opens, Dungeon XP Is Reversed and 16 Legacy Points Land
Blizzard took the Forever beta down at 9:00 a.m. PDT on Thursday, an hour earlier than usual, with a two-line warning that the team had "gathered up several fixes for behind-the-scenes, non-gameplay issues that we're going to deploy and then test internally, in addition to a full suite of bug fixes and gameplay adjustments." Realms were expected back by 3:00 p.m. PDT, and a full update to the Development Notes and Known Issues posts was promised "later today."
Original editorial illustration by RealmList, generated for this article. This is artwork, not game footage or official promotional material.
It delivered, and then some. Icy Veins called the resulting changelog "one of the biggest development notes so far"; Hotspawn billed it as the beta's third full update. By volume of player-facing change, it is the largest single build of the test — and the two that matter most are a dungeon, and arithmetic.
The XP reversal is the real headline
Two lines in the October 8 notes change how levelling works in a group:
The experience earned from killing creatures in dungeons has been increased by approximately 20%.
Fixed a bug that reduced XP granted to players who were in a party with higher-level players killing lower-level enemies.
The second one comes with a developer note that is unusually blunt about what had been happening. Until this build, Forever calculated party experience against the highest-level member of the group. In Classic Era, that adjustment was made individually, per player. Blizzard has reverted to the Era behaviour:
"We believe the combination of these two changes will dramatically increase experience earned in dungeons for most players."
In practice this is a bigger change than the 20% headline. A group running with one over-levelled friend was quietly taxed on every pull for three weeks of beta. That tax is now gone, with the familiar exception preserved: if a party member is far above the level of the mob being killed, nobody in the party gets experience.
It also partly walks back the October 1 build, which cut the bonus XP from dungeon quests by 50%. Read the two together and the shape is clear — Blizzard wants dungeon experience to come from clearing the dungeon, not from a quest-and-rush loop. Hotspawn's reading of the same two changes is worth repeating: Blizzard does not want dungeon levelling to be the way to level, but it also does not want groups skipping to the end.
The same day, Blizzard published Episode 3 of the WoW: Forever Podcast with host Countdown To Classic, guest Hammerdance, and designers Josh "Aggrend" Greenfield, Jay Hartman and Rowan Ryder — the episode's stated subject is dungeon levelling, questing, and more. A build that buffs dungeon XP and a podcast about dungeon levelling arriving on the same afternoon is not a coincidence.
The City of Dalaran is live for testing
The new dungeon is the fourth of the nine announced Forever dungeons to reach the beta, after Hall of Thanes, Ruins of Lordaeron and Excavation Site: Wetlands. It is also the one Josh Greenfield had to publicly walk back on October 1, when he confirmed it was not in the level-30 build and would arrive in a later one.
Both factions can run it, with a slightly different story on each side — and according to Hotspawn's summary, the Alliance is allowed to stay in the city afterwards while the Horde is not. Blizzard has not published a level bracket for it in the notes.
Four Rage bugs, one build
Warrior and Druid Rage has been the beta's most-documented defect. Greenfield acknowledged it on September 25 and warned the root cause "may take a couple weeks"; Aidan Moon confirmed a dual-wield Rage bug that was skewing the team's own balance data on October 1. The October 8 build closes out four separate calculation errors at once:
| Bug | Effect while it was live |
|---|---|
| Rage from damage used the player's health instead of a creature's expected health | More Stamina meant less Rage |
| Combat multipliers ignored | Critical strikes and crushing blows did not grant the Rage they should |
| Damage absorbs mishandled | Power Word: Shield and similar effects suppressed Rage generation |
| Rage balanced around an assumed 50% Armor | Fine for tanks, wrong for everyone else |
The fix note states the third point plainly: absorbs should now be ignored when calculating Rage received, "as if the Warrior/Druid had no absorb active." The fourth point is a design admission — Rage is now rebalanced against 20% to 40% Armor, varying by level, rather than a flat tank-shaped assumption. Druids additionally move critical-strike Rage from 75% to 100% more, matching what Warriors received in the October 1 build.
Everything else, by class
The October 8 notes work straight through the Known Issues list. Debuffs that caused no threat, Retribution Aura using the wrong spell power, Druids unable to drink potions in form, Cat Form reducing maximum health — all four were sitting on Blizzard's own known-issues post, and all four are addressed here.
| Class | October 8 changes |
|---|---|
| Druid | Bear Form threat bonus to 50% (was 30%); Demoralizing Roar generates threat; mana potions usable in Bear/Dire Bear/Cat Form; crit Rage to 100%; Thorns returned to Vanilla base damage with a 6% spell power ratio (was 13.3%); Cat Form max-health bug fixed; Predatory Instincts becomes Natural Instinct |
| Paladin | Retribution Aura now uses the Paladin's spell power, but at Vanilla base damage — roughly 33% less — with the same 6% ratio; Prot threat from mana regeneration removed; Reckoning gains a 1.5-second cooldown |
| Priest | Penance was being treated as a 3-second channel instead of 2, so Discipline damage and healing come down; rank 1 costs 50% more mana, ranks 2 and 4 heal for more |
| Warrior | Demoralizing Shout generates threat; Arms must take Deep Wounds to reach Impale; Last Stand corrected for Protection |
| Hunter | Disengage finally gets its doubled threat reduction; Survival's Expose Prey lasts 10 seconds (was 5); Entrapment gains diminishing returns; Unleashed Fury now actually boosts pet damage |
| Warlock | Pets are stunned when you summon a new pet; rank changes only |
| Mage, Shaman | Spell-rank adjustments and bug fixes |
| Rogue | Nothing |
Thorns and Retribution Aura landing on the same Vanilla base and the same 6% ratio in the same build is the clearest sign of a policy rather than a pass of individual tweaks — reflective damage was over-scaling with spell power, and both abilities were pulled back to a common formula.
16 Legacy Points, and a respec that costs a silver
Since October 1, Blizzard has been promising that testers would get to try the Legacy System without grinding the talent points first. The October 8 build cashes that promise in the most direct way available: every beta player had the Legacy Challenge marked complete, awarding all 16 spendable Legacy Points. The 16-point figure is not arbitrary — it is the per-character spending cap we broke down in our full Legacy System guide.
The second half of that entry is the more interesting one for testers. The cheapest Legacy respec now costs 1 silver, and the price decays by one respec per hour, mirroring how class-talent respec costs work — and Blizzard notes this applies during the beta only. A 16-point tree with a one-silver respec is a system that can actually be compared rather than committed to.
Also in the build
- Cooldown Manager now supports all classes, all racial abilities and all trinkets; consumables are coming in a later patch.
- Weapon swapping within the same global cooldown is back, so two-hander-to-sword-and-board macros work again.
- Classic looting behaviour returns, letting you interact with corpses that dropped nothing.
- Fixes for visual effect flickering on large creatures and for creature behaviour causing unintended long-distance pulls.
- A large item pass with visual and mechanical changes, and what Icy Veins describes as a giant set of quest fixes.
- Gamepad: input indicators for hold-versus-press actions, a fix for inputs breaking after looting, map focus moved to the Quest Log, and the gamepad action bar gains edit-mode support with per-UI-type layouts.
What the notes still do not say
Nothing in the October 8 changelog, and nothing in the Known Issues post that accompanied it, names the Auction House — or mail, or whispers.
That matters because it is the second half of a story we have been tracking since October 4: a services outage on one beta realm that has now outlived two maintenance windows and the largest development update of the test. This build was the best chance the problem had to appear in a changelog — the maintenance announcement explicitly promised "behind-the-scenes, non-gameplay issues" deployed and tested internally, which is the exact shape of a realm-to-services desynchronisation. The day-three report on that outage predicted this morning would be the moment the silence either broke or became an anomaly. It is now an anomaly: across three maintenance posts and a Known Issues update, the only Auction House entry in Blizzard's public beta bug record remains the September 29 deposit bug.
The October 8 Known Issues list carried forward the October 1 entries — chained-spell precast effects, Parry and Block landing from behind at close range, the oversized client install, gamepad UI resetting edit-mode layouts, Scroll of Liminal Passage, dwarf water splash sounds, Eureka missing some spells, mage Research access, "Break A Few Eggs" respawn rates and Anduin Wrynn's hat — and added three new ones:
| New October 8 known issue | Detail |
|---|---|
| Skyborne druid textures | Bear and travel form updated; cat form, Zephras Isle creatures, and some mounts and pets come in a future build |
| Hunter Ferocity tooltip | The pet's critical strike chance does not increase on the character sheet — a visual bug only |
| Profession window icons | Some appear broken |
For context on why the communication gap is drawing attention: in the maintenance thread itself, the most-repeated sentiment was not about the AH at all. One poster called this "the make it or break it build for the beta," noting that "this past week has not been good for positivity and optimism on this game longterm." The build answers a lot of that on mechanics. It does not answer it on the one issue players have been asking about for five days.
The clock
Two dates are now fixed. The level cap stays at 30 for the remainder of the test — there is no third increase. And the beta ends October 21, 2026, two weeks after this build, ahead of name reservation on October 27 and the worldwide launch on November 4 at 3:00 p.m. PST. Warcraft Tavern's report of the maintenance described the end as October 22; Blizzard's own published window, and every launch timeline derived from it, says October 21, so treat the 22nd as an error in secondhand coverage rather than a change.
Sources and further reading
External references used to verify or expand this article.