The Forever beta picked up a substantial update build this week: the official development notes cover talent respec pricing, the Cooldown Manager and a large batch of bug fixes. The class-numbers side (Holy Strike buffs, Wrath +50%, etc.) is in our sister class-balancing report.

One, respec prices: slashed for the beta

The community's most-requested change has landed — talent respec costs are temporarily reduced, with the following rules:

ScenarioPrice
First respec (some time since your last one)1 silver
Respec again within 1 hour5 gold
A full hour since your last respecBack down to 1 silver

The official notes are explicit: this is a beta-only temporary mechanic meant to let testers experiment freely with different builds — prices return to vanilla levels at launch. If you want to practice a "respec-free" build mindset, these two weeks are the window.

Friendly plug: if you're unsure what to pick, lay out a build in our on-site talent simulator first, then verify in game.

Two, the Cooldown Manager goes live

The Cooldown Manager that retail introduced amid its "addon disarmament" wave is now officially ported into Forever — both versions share the same client and addon restrictions, so the port was a natural fit:

  • Enabling: Options → Advanced Options, off by default;
  • Customizing: drag it around in Edit Mode and use /cdm to configure tracked abilities;
  • First-wave classes: Druid, Mage, Priest, Warrior and Warlock to test, with later builds extending to other classes;
  • Known limits: spell ranks are not supported yet (the team is on it); the feedback they want most is "which abilities should be tracked by default".

The feature pulls key cooldown information out of the buff bar/action bars into a fully customizable position — for vanilla players, it is essentially a built-in, minimalist official WeakAuras.

Three, other new features worth knowing

  • Statistics pane: the character sheet gains a Statistics tab — no more guessing at output numbers;
  • Inspect improvements: a batch of quality-of-life upgrades for viewing others' gear and talents;
  • Profession improvements: several convenience upgrades for professions land as well.

Four, the fix list highlights

This week's build carries plenty of bug fixes; the ones with the biggest player-facing impact:

  • Memory leak fixed: the culprit behind gradual performance degradation in long sessions was found and fixed;
  • Mac display fixes: water-rendering errors and various display artifacts resolved;
  • Pet happiness: happiness no longer incorrectly drops at maximum loyalty;
  • Campfire quality of life: you can buff, cast and craft items while waiting out a campfire buff, and sitting/lying/kneeling characters receive it too;
  • Casting visuals: fixes for spell cast bars not playing and casting-while-standing issues;
  • Miscellany: the SoD rune "Blind"-style ability unexpectedly visible on rogues, overly bright Undercity canal slimes, mail ignoring surnames — all handled.

Sources