The answer appears to be very Forever: keep the identity, remove some of the historical nonsense, then add just enough new toys to make another trip from level 1 to 60 feel different.
Fear Ward Is No Longer a Dwarf Problem
The Priest changes contain one particularly important philosophical shift. Fear Ward and Devouring Plague will now be learned by every Priest at level 20 regardless of race. That means choosing a Priest race no longer carries quite the same enormous gameplay baggage it did in original WoW, where Dwarf Priests became enormously desirable simply because Fear Ward happened to be attached to their beard.
Racial Priest spells are not disappearing, however. Blizzard is instead refreshing them while giving each race two racial abilities of its own. Gnome Priests, one of Forever's new race and class combinations, receive Confounding Flash and Contingency Plan, while existing Priest races also get adjusted or redesigned abilities.
Priests gain other additions too. Divine Spirit becomes baseline at level 30, while Shadow Word: Death arrives as a new baseline spell at level 32. Discipline, Holy and Shadow are all receiving talent changes, with familiar later-WoW abilities including Penance, Binding Heal, Prayer of Mending and Vampiric Embrace appearing within the redesigned trees.
This is exactly the line Blizzard described when explaining why Forever will not launch with Shaman tanks or healing Mages. The developers are willing to repair old class problems, but they do not want every class to become an entirely different creature wearing a familiar name.
Warrior Rage Is Being Rebuilt Again
Warriors have a different problem. They need Rage, preferably in quantities normally associated with somebody discovering that the tank pulled while the healer was drinking.
Blizzard says the current beta still contains bugs affecting Rage generation, but several deliberate changes are now clear. Rage gained from taking damage will ignore Armor and absorption effects, meaning better mitigation should no longer quietly punish Warriors by starving them of their primary resource. Rage from attacking is being normalized according to weapon speed, while critical strikes will once again generate extra Rage, with Blizzard currently setting that bonus at 75 percent.
Tactical Mastery also becomes a baseline ability at level 14, allowing Warriors to retain 10 Rage when switching stances. Charge can be used in Defensive Stance, Recklessness no longer shares a cooldown with Shield Wall and Retaliation, and Victory Rush arrives at level 20 as another recognizable ability imported carefully into the older combat structure.
That matters because Forever's class tuning has already been moving rapidly during beta. Blizzard is not merely changing damage coefficients. It is rebuilding some of the plumbing underneath the classes.
This Is What Classic Plus Actually Looks Like
There will inevitably be arguments over individual talents, Rage values and whether giving Fear Ward to everybody removes something uniquely Classic. That is probably unavoidable. Forever was never going to satisfy both players who want untouched Vanilla and players who want twenty years of class development squeezed back into 2004 Azeroth.
What Blizzard appears to be building instead is something in between. Forever's version of Classic+ keeps Warriors worrying about Rage and Priests worrying about mana, positioning and their next heal. It simply asks whether some of the stranger restrictions from 2004 still deserve to survive.
Apparently Dwarf Priests having a monopoly on Fear Ward did not make the cut.
Somewhere, a 2005 raid leader just felt a disturbance in the Force and does not know why.
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