5. Combat, Items, Classes & Talents
Kris Zierhut: Hello, BlizzCon. So, it’s been two years since we stopped work on Season of Discovery. What have the class and item designers been up to since then? We’re gonna need to move quickly. I’m gonna talk about our combat philosophy, exciting changes to itemization, new racial abilities, and finally anyone here play a paladin? A deep dive look at all of our class and talent changes for the Paladin class to illustrate all of our class design across the game.
Combat Philosophy
First, let’s talk about how combat works in World of Warcraft: Forever. Our team loves the feel and pacing of combat in World of Warcraft Classic. It’s important to use that we do not change how that combat feels.
And that leads to some very important design decisions. First, keep our classes simple, but with surprising depth. Keep our classes distinct with each having unique strengths and weaknesses. No homogenization. Combat pacing is a little slower. It takes you about 15 seconds to kill a creature on your own.
And dungeon gameplay is tactical. That means crowd control matters. You need to polymorph, vanish, root, trap, monsters to keep control, to keep the healer from getting killed, from keeping the tank from being overun from too much damage. And threat matters. Our tanks can only do threat on three or four targets at once. You can’t pull a whole dungeon all at once.
Stats
Moving on to stats. One of the things we wanted to do in World of Warcraft: Forever was unsolve the game. We’ve all been playing Classic for 22 years, and we know everything, we know what to do, we know those perfect paths and what items to get, what if all that changes?
What if you got to solve it again? To that end, we’ve made a ton of changes to itemization throughout the game. And we love having many different choices how to gear your character with different stats, and those choices changing based on which class you’re playing, what combats you’re in, where you go.
So we’re keeping all of the stats from WoW: Classic and with a few changes, and also adding more that came in some of the future expansions. Although, I’ll say we’re not adding resilience. First, let’s talk about “Hit Chance.” In World of Warcraft: Classic, Hit was separate from melee, ranged, and spells, and that was kind of awkward. If you’re an enhancement shaman or a ret paladin or even a warrior who wants your taunts to land. So with unified hit, hit is for all types of attacks at once, which doesn’t just benefit the paladins, but also rogues landing their poisons, hunters landing their traps, warriors landing their taunts.
And we’ve done the exact same thing with your chance to critical strike. That is also all merged in the same way. Now weapon skill was probably the strongest stat, especially for melee in World of Warcraft Classic, but it was a little too easy to get and a little too strong. So you may recall in Burning Crusade, we removed it. We’ll want to keep it, so we’ve rebalanced it. You can’t get quite as much on a single item as you used to, but you can get it. It still works. It’s still very valuable.
For our healing classes, one of their problems was you go to Naxxramas, you get an amazing set of gear, and you go out questing, and you can’t kill anything. Right? So we’ve adopted the change that all of our healing items also come with bonus damage, so our healers can enjoy the whole game as well.
We’re also adding many new stats that didn’t exist in WoW: Classic. You can now reduce the chance for your attacks to be parried and dodged, which is really great for tanks as it does double duty. Spellcaster-oriented weapons now grant bonus spell damage and healing all the way down to level 10. Spellcasters will now care about their weapons as much as warriors and rogues do. Everyone gets to have a more fun game the whole way along.
One big area of change was trinkets. We want trinkets to have more variety, more different ways to solve problems, so that they’re all much more specialized and target specific situations. You’ve got a bag full of tricks. You’re pulling out for different encounters in different situations. The Worgenbane Talisman is a great example.
We also added two whole new classes of effects on items, some that only work or work better in certain areas, mountains or deserts or cities or caverns, and others that have bonus effects against different species like X’caliboar here does bonus damage against
undead and swine, whatever that is.
Massive Re-itemization Pass
We’ve done a massive re-itemization across the entire game. Every single dungeon boss has had their loot reexamined. Everything is upgraded to rare quality. Many new items have been added, and old items that maybe weren’t up to snuff are better, but the old favorites, the really standout items, are also still there.
New quest rewards have been added across the board. A very famous quest is well known to the alliance players. In Duskwood, you get a quest to go kill the undead soldier, Mor’Ladim. You’re super excited about this. You get a group together. You kill him, and maybe you’re a mage or a shaman or priest, whatever. At the end of the quest, you get a two-handed sword. Well, that’s great if you’re a warrior or a paladin. What about everybody else? So now Mor’Ladim also hands you back his heirloom family ring, which is a fantastic spell power ring.
Another great example, when you finish all of Hemet Nesingwary’s quests in Stranglethorn, he will give you a Master Hunter’s Bow or a Master Hunter’s Crossbow. He now also has a Master Hunter’s Wand and this Master Hunter’s Spellsword, specifically designed for ret paladins to do. It has strength and spell damage on it together. And there’s much more itemization for all of those hybrid specs across the game than there were ever before.
We’ve gone through all of our world drop epics, and they’ve all been revisited. When you see an epic drop, it’s that exciting moment. “Oh my gosh, I’m getting an epic!” And they’re often really disappointing. They weren’t that great, actually. So we’ve gone through them all and made them all much stronger, much more useful. So you may see one of these drop. You’ll know you want to use it or give it to a friend or maybe sell it in the auction house. And even added a few ones like this ranged thrown weapon here.
Racial Abilities
Alright, next up, racial abilities. One of the things that we like about racial abilities in WoW Classic is they give you a reason to make a new character, play a new class, play a new race, see the game through new eyes. So we decided to make our racial abilities stronger and more different than they ever were before.
We also added six new race-class combinations, gnome priests, human hunters, dwarf shamans, orc mages, and troll warlocks, and of course, the undead paladin. With more planned to come in future content.
(Guy in the audience yells: Undead hunter!)
(laughs) That would be cool. Each race now has two active abilities and two passive abilities, tuned to give each race an equal similar amount of offensive power and signature utility and survivability. I’m going to share details of dwarves, and undead because of our new options with shamans and paladins.
Stoneform is mostly unchanged, but you might recall, say you were a dwarf priest (there were a lot of those) it increase your armor, and who cares, you had no armor. It wasn’t doing anything. So now it reduces physical damage and doesn’t care how much armor you have. Find Treasure was a useful racial ability but it conflicted with finding herbs, tracking beasts, finding minerals, so now Find Treasure can be active at the same time as any other tracking ability. So you can look for iron nodes, and treasure at the same time.
Inspired by Hemet Nessingwary, dwarves now have Big Game Hunter, dealing 5% increased damage to beasts. We really like abilities like this because they give each different character in your party array a chance to shine on a different encounter. There might be a fight where you’re fighting humanoids, and the rogue is the best. You’re fighting undead and paladin is the best and you’re fighting a beast, the dwarves are going to get a chance to shine. So the reason to bring everybody, everybody gets a mooment in the sun.
Finally, mace specialization is a good example of how we’ve changed weapon skill. So weapon skill used to be only good for melee and a little too strong, but now, while a dwarf has any kind of mace equipped, they get 1% increased crit chance to their spells, melee, and ranged abilities.
So those shamans and priests will now care about having a mace equipped and benefit from this racial. Let’s move on to the undead. Will of the Forsaken was a little bit too strong. It gave you immunity to these effects. Now it simply breaks them. But we’ve made up for it by giving them a lot of new stuff.
Cannibalize now doesn’t just give you your health back, it gives you mana back. Particularly fantastic for those paladins. Underwater breathing is as it always was, but remember, in WoW Classic, that breath was really short. So that increased amount of time underwater makes you able to do a lot more.
And finally, the big one, Touch of the Grave, this new racial for the undead, gives them the increased damage and survival that they never had before. Each of your attacks and spells has a chance to drain health from the target, doing extra damage, and also healing you and keeping you alive.
That’s just a taste of our racials. Go play the demo to see them all.
Class Abilities
Alright. Let’s talk about classes. We’re going to take a deep dive into talents. But first, I want to talk about our philosophy on talents. All classes still have three talent trees. They still have seven rows. They still have those one-point talents at 11, 21, 31, the gold medal talents, we called them. We’ve even added a fourth gold medal talent at the 16 mark in every single one of the talent trees.
Many talents are exactly the same as they were, unchanged from 2006. But many have been updated and improved and new have been added. In particular, there were a lot of talents that gave you better buffs. Improved Battle Shout, Divine Spirit, Blessing of Kings, Improved Mark of the Wild. They are all gone.
All those bonuses are now baseline to the entire class. You don’t need a talent into them. And what’s great about that is it makes room for more cool new stuff. Our goal was to make sure that every single one of our 27 talent trees is a viable option to bring to your dungeon or raid group.
Every class, every spec is worthy to come, but no class is so strong or spec is so strong that you want to stack them. And they’re not equal. They all have different distinct strengths and weaknesses that they bring to the group. So we don’t have time to look at every class, so let’s take a deep dive look at Paladin.
First, what changed for the whole class? I don’t know how many people here played the 2004 beta. Probably a few. I did. But Paladins back then had an ability called Holy Strike that got cut before the game was shipped. We brought it back. At level 6, all Paladins learn Holy Strike, give them a little bit more melee damage doing holy damage based on their weapon for the target.
The 12-second cooldown, and every one of the three Paladin trees has ways to improve Holy Strike. Judgment no longer consumes your seal. No more seal busy work. You have better things to do. We’ve added a new seal called Seal of Fury that is our answer to tanking Paladins. And yes, you can tank as a Paladin. Does three things. First, every time you swing, just like the Seal of Righteousness, it does damage to the target, but it doesn’t matter how fast your weapon is. So the faster the weapon you use, the more damage it’ll do, the more effective.
It grants a small absorb shield to the paladin, helping them stay alive a little bit. But most importantly, Judgment of Fury is your new taunt. It taunts the target, and this is particularly interesting because Growl and Taunt have a 5-yard range, and Judgment has a 10-yard range. So Paladin’s got a little bit more reach to reach out and grab something and bring it to the fight than the other tanks have.
Finally, we had to make some changes to Consecration. Those of you who played Burning Crusade know that Paladin Consecration can dominate damage tanking runs. And we want to maintain that tactical combat I was talking about where you can’t just pull the whole dungeon at once. So Consecration now does light damage to every target that enters the consecration and heavy damage to the first four. So you’re going to have enough threat on those first four targets, but not on the rest. And everybody has to kee respecting your threat and your ability to control and not pull the whole room.
Alright, let’s move on to talents, starting with holy Paladin talents. As I mentioned, everybody has improvements to Holy Strike, the very first row of holy has improved holy strike, reducing its cooldown. Probably every paladin is going to take this one. Voice of Truth is their new 11-point gold medal talent, giving some immunity to silence and interrupts.
Reverence, however, is a big change for Paladins. Yes, Paladins will now care about spirit and get regen from it while in combat. In fact, all of our classes that do damage and healing via mana will have talents or abilities that give them mana back based on your spirit. So spirit is worth having on your gear. That includes especially holy paladins and resto shamans.
And finally, Divine Power used to be a little deeper in the tree. It used to be a 16 to make room for more stuff, but basically the same as it ever was. Moving on. Infusion of Light is a new talent that solves a problem that holy paladin has had across multiple expansions, where either they’re casting Flash of Light all the time and nothing else, or Holy Light all the time and nothing else.
It’s how encouraging you to mix those spells together and use your whole toolkit. Holy Shock used to be the 31-point talent and is now at 21-points in the talent tree, which makes it in reach of a lot of hybrid PvP builds in particular. And its cooldown has been reduced to 10 seconds. You can use it a lot more often. It’s going to be key for another build I’m about to talk about.
Consecrated Ground plays into the whole Shockadin fantasy of holy. While targets are standing on your consecration, they take more holy damage from your attacks. And finally, Light’s Vigil solves several problems for paladins. The biggest one is they have no way to heal a whole party at once. Now we don’t want to make them the same as priests and druids, and how they can do that, or shamans and chain heal. So instead, Light’s Vigil requires setup. You put Light’s Vigil on the target, one of your friends, and the next time you Holy Shock them their entire target party of that target will be healed, and Holy Shock’s cooldown will be reset.
If you’re really smart, you put Light’s Vigil up on multiple parties, and then Holy Shock, Holy Shock, Holy Shock, Holy Shock, and your whole raid group is back to a place where they can survive the big blast to hit them.
Similarly, you can use it on enemies to do increased damage and, again, reset the cooldown of Holy Shock to support that shock and build. Moving on to Protection Paladin talents. Their new 11-point talent is Improved Seal of Fury, which gives them mana back when Seal of Fury blocks damage
And Shield Specialization combines with it to give them enough mana to sustain combat for the entire boss. So every time you block, you are taking mana back, and the more you things you are blocking, the more mana you are getting. Swift Judment solves a problem that all our tanks have. It’s their new 16-point talent. What do you do when your taunt misses? If you’re a Warrior, you hit Mocking Blow. You hit Challenging Shout. If you’re a Druid you hit Challenging Roar. If you’re a Paladin, Swift Judment resets the cooldown on Judgment and lets you use it again to taunt the target again and get a second chance.
Or maybe use it creatively on the pulls to get more Judgment debuffs upon the target quickly. Templar’s Bulwark is their new 21-point talent that plays with their system for Forbearance. It triggers Forbearance; it’s prevented by Forbearance, but it also grants you an absorb shield equal to 100% of your health, making you a lot more survivable, but it’s a hard choice up against things like Divine Shield.
Reckoning is an old favorite; it’s not going anywhere but it’s been improved, like that are supposed to be incredible, right? So Reckoning now has a chance to trigger every time you block. And if you’re taking more things, you’re blocking more things, getting more extra attacks.
Finally, Iron Creed is a deep talent in Protection that, when you use your Holy Strike, reduces your damage you take for a few seconds by 10%. So a very careful paladin can help their healers keep them alive in those critical moments by timing their Holy Strike.
Alright, finally, Retribution. Vindication’s an old talent that everybody skipped. What it did was reduce the target’s strength and agility, but in PvE, it had basically no effect. We’ve reworked it, and now works like Demoralizing Shout and Demoralizing Roar reducing the target’s attack power. And by the way, all three of those reduced by the same amount.
Sacred Arbiter is a unique paladin utility. When paladins judge a target, the way they have to maintain it is staying close to judge again or meleeing that target. But now with Sacred Arbiter, a ret paladin can keep the judgments up for all of the other paladins in their party or raid. So you can benefit from Light and Wisdom, and Crusader at the same time.
Champion of the Light is a new ability deep in the tree that gives increased spell damage and healing based on your intellect. So now those items that increase your mana pool, maybe you don’t want to skip those. Maybe you want those combined with strength or attack power to do the most damage.
Instrument of the Law solves two problems. One, it makes Hammer of Wrath instant for Retribution Paladins. And second, now that their damage is as good as everyone else, they need a little threat reduction. Finally, Twist of Light is our answer to seal twisting, which you know you love, or at least some of you do. So now each time you replace one of your damaging seals with another seal, you get an echo of the replaced seal.
And then you swing. Your melee swings benefit from both seals at the same time if you alternate Seal of Command and Seal of Righteousness; every swing will benefit from both seals. But I do know some people do not like seal twisting. So using that increased spell power from Champion of Light, drop this talent, go 21 points down the Holy tree, use Holy Shock for a shock, and then build on Retribution instead.
So we gave paladins some new tools that they were sorely lacking, but we left them with significant holes in their toolkit. We don’t want to homogenize our classes.
Paladins still can’t interrupt. They still can’t slow the target down, but they are very very strong against demons and undead. They have limited range capabilities. They have this unique seal and judment system that no other class has, with powerful effects. They can be very effective tanks. They deal competitive damage. But as a healer, they have limited ability to heal a party. They’ve got to plan ahead, use Light’s Vigil. But they’re still the best single target healer in the game, able to maintain their mana pool longer than any other class can.
I wasn’t able to share with you all of our changes for every class I raised today. Please go play the demo. Check out the beta when it comes out on Thursday (Sept 17, 2026). We will have videos and blogs and question and answer sessions in the weeks to come. We’ll give you more details and our deeper vision.
I’ve had a great time up here on stage with you today. Have a great BlizzCon, everybody.
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| BLIZZCON 2026 WORLD OF WARCRAFT: FOREVER DEEP DIVE PANEL TRANSCRIPT | ||||
| 1. Intro | 2. New Systems | 3. Legacy System | 4. Server Systems | 5. Itemization |
