When the first raids open on December 10 (December 9 in the West), how much time should your guild block off for progression? Blizzard's number for WoW: Forever: roughly two to three weeks for the average guild. On November 8 (US Central), streamer Joardee had developers Josh Greenfield (appearing under his handle "Aggrend" in the recap) and Tim Jones on for a full episode about Forever's raids; Wowhead's recap went up the same day at 1:00 p.m. US Central — 3:00 a.m. November 9 in Beijing. Last week, Kris Zierhut and Tim Jones joined Crix to break down loot splits and PvP balance; this conversation moved to the design table: how the raids get built, how hard they hit, and what they drop.
One Difficulty: Your Casual Raid Fights the Same Bosses as the Hardcore Guild
The stance on difficulty tiers fits in a sentence: instanced content gets one difficulty, period. Ulduar hard modes get credit for being cool, but they get cast as the start of the split — the moment one raid became a Normal crowd and a Heroic crowd. What the developers want to keep is the Classic-era math: every guild competes on the same bosses, and the encounter a casual raid faces is the exact one a hardcore raid faces. That, they argue, has value in itself.
The stash is part of the plan too: raids can carry creative encounters, hidden bosses and secret phases. The hard fights at the end of a raid — or tucked away out of sight — drop gear with showing-off value: wear it in the capital city and everyone sees it.
Baseline Naxx Difficulty, No Addon Warnings
The difficulty reference matches the previous two conversations: encounters sit in the range of the Season of Mastery raids and baseline Naxxramas — the same anchor the Crix interview and Michael Nuthals' official podcast episode used. The new detail is where the warnings stop: vanilla raids' visual language stays, meaning no gigantic visual outlines announcing mechanics, and no requirement to run addons to raid.
The Season of Discovery lesson sits on the same table: Scarlet Enclave was a lot of fun and genuinely creative, but maybe too challenging — SoD may have pushed boss complexity and tuning too far by the end. The developers sound excited about bringing Scarlet Enclave back into Forever down the road; no plan or date announced.
Onyxia Drops a Pile: Fewer Bodies, More Per Head
Onyxia, the 40-man of the first tier, will drop a lot of loot — which turns her into a different kind of challenge by the developers' reading: the fewer people you bring, the more each one walks away with, so the question becomes how few you can kill her with, or doing it purely for the bragging rights. Once your raid has December on farm, your raid leader has a theme night to schedule.
Item Level Won't Go Flat: Return Trips to Hyjal With a Target List
Greenfield's math: purely flat horizontal progression assumes all loot is equal, and in practice you're deep into Tier 4 while still wanting something out of the first raid — that's why Forever won't run a purely flat item level curve. The practical consequence: old raids don't expire. A free raid night a few patches from now may be the night you take your healers back to Hyjal for the Legendary Staff; Hyjal has multiple wings, and if you want to target a specific boss for its loot, you can. Further out sit shortcuts, in the vein of Naxxramas' Translocation Orb — timing not announced. The active tier expects you to walk the intended progression path; target farming afterward is explicitly about respecting your time.
Chase items are part of the arrangement too: bosses across the raids carry pieces of real power. The flip side of a non-flat item curve is that a piece sitting in an old raid may be exactly what you want next week.
Molten Core and Blackwing Lair: Familiar, but New
Tim Jones is excited about raids being different from each other. When the game goes back to Blackwing Lair and Molten Core, the stated target is "familiar but new" — and narratively, those raids are meant to mark points in time: every raid your guild clears moves the story forward a notch. A return schedule has not been announced.
Before December 10, Four Things for the Calendar
- Budget 2-3 weeks of progression in your raid calendar (that's the average-guild figure) — don't cram the kill expectation into week one.
- Don't count on addon warnings: mechanics won't come with gigantic outlines, so read up on boss abilities and your own responsibilities before the first pull — which lines up with the earlier expectation that bringing friends, wearing pre-BiS and skimming boss guides should carry you through at low stress.
- Save a theme night for Onyxia: with her big loot table, a minimum-people kill once your raid is on farm pays out more per head.
- Don't liquidate your gear bank: item levels won't go flat across raids, so what you stock now stays a farm target patches later, and the powerful items on various bosses belong on your want list.