World of Warcraft players are very good at discovering things.
Unfortunately for Blizzard, they are even better at discovering them three months before they are supposed to.
WoW Forever is attempting something unusually aggressive to fight that problem. Blizzard has hidden the stats of 12,594 items from dataminers, representing roughly 40% of the more than 31,800 items currently present in Forever’s data. Players can often see that an item exists, but its actual stats remain unavailable until somebody legitimately discovers it in the game.
So far, beta players have revealed 4,419 of those hidden items. That still leaves 8,175 items waiting somewhere behind Blizzard’s curtain, according to a detailed analysis of Forever’s hidden database content.
For a game built on twenty-year-old Azeroth, that is an impressive amount of stuff we still do not know.
Loot Only Reveals Itself When Players Find It
Blizzard explained the philosophy before the beta launched. Forever deliberately hides loot stats to prevent complete Best in Slot lists from existing before content opens. Once an item is actually discovered by a player, Blizzard can send its information out and the wider community can begin cataloguing it.
That means the mystery is temporary, not magical. Wowhead, spreadsheets and Discord servers will eventually solve the game because Warcraft players consider an unsorted loot table a personal insult.
But somebody has to find the item first.
That distinction could make the opening days of new dungeons and raids substantially more interesting. Instead of knowing that Boss Three drops the exact boots your Warrior needs before anybody has killed Boss One, players may actually have to discover what is waiting inside.
Entire Dungeon Loot Tables Are Still Hidden
The numbers become particularly impressive when you look at dungeons.
Early instances such as Deadmines, Wailing Caverns, Shadowfang Keep and Ragefire Chasm have now had their new loot exposed through beta testing. Later dungeons are another matter. Hundreds of items remain hidden across places such as Sunken Temple, Blackrock Depths, Dire Maul, Stratholme and Scholomance.
That matters because Blizzard is already rebuilding hundreds of Classic loot drops. Familiar bosses may still drop familiar treasures, but plenty of weaker old items have been redesigned and completely new rewards have been inserted throughout Azeroth.
We have already seen how strange that can become. One Deadmines ring appears to connect directly to a level-60 Epic through a two-piece set. If that is what Blizzard is willing to hide in an early dungeon, the untouched level-60 loot tables become considerably more interesting.
Blizzard Has Gone Beyond Hiding Item Stats
Some Forever content is not merely obscured. It is actually encrypted behind separate keys.
Current analysis has identified one encrypted package apparently containing five new dungeons, 34 boss encounters and 329 loot entries. Those dungeons are believed to include The Drowned City, Krol’dok Stronghold, Alcaz Prison, Blackmaw Hold and Shaper’s Terrace.
Another encrypted package appears connected to Forever’s first two raids, likely Hyjal Summit and The Barrow Deeps. That package contains data associated with 22 encounters and 153 loot entries.
Those identifications are based on what surrounds the encrypted data, so some details remain inference until Blizzard actually supplies the relevant keys. But the intention is obvious: entire chunks of Forever are being kept out of reach until Blizzard decides players are supposed to see them.
Even Dataminers Are Only Finding the Edges of Some Secrets
We have already seen how effective that approach can be with Forever’s first new Legendary. Our look at the datamined Legendary questline found references to Moonglade, Un’Goro, Hyjal and Archimonde, but the actual weapon name and stats remain encrypted.
Dataminers can see footprints around the locked door.
They still cannot open it.
There are also currently 75 mount models without normal database entries and 1,773 missing spell records within the wider Forever data. Not everything hidden there will necessarily appear in the finished game. Some entries are leftovers from Season of Discovery, development experiments or content Blizzard may never use.
That makes the numbers less useful as a promise of 8,175 future treasures and much more useful as evidence of just how aggressively Blizzard is obscuring Forever’s database.
Blizzard Is Trying to Unsolve Azeroth
Forever will not remain mysterious forever. Once players find an item, somebody will upload it. Someone else will calculate its stat weight. By the following morning, a YouTube thumbnail will probably explain why you have been playing your class incorrectly for twenty years.
Blizzard knows that.
The goal appears to be creating a brief window where discovery happens inside Azeroth before it happens inside a database. Our complete guide to WoW Forever’s changes shows how often that idea appears across the project, from redesigned loot to unexplored dungeons and secrets scattered through familiar zones.
More than 12,500 hidden items will not stop Warcraft players from solving Forever.
But for once, Blizzard might make us log in first.
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