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The World of Warcraft: Forever min-maxers have been arguing about the pros and cons of each playable race since the throwback MMO was announced. It isn’t enough to just pick whoever looks cool for some people. They need to know how the math works out so they don’t spend a hundred hours leveling a character who will do 3% less damage than the others.
Admittedly, WoW: Forever will be stuck in an era where unique racial abilities and traits mattered a lot more than they do in the modern version of the MMO. Some of them directly synergize with certain classes and others just make your life a lot easier for what will be a long journey. This is probably why Blizzard is still tweaking them a week from launch day.
Despite trying to balance them evenly before, Blizzard is doubling down on some racials having clear advantages for certain classes over others. You can see how this looks in today’s patch notes, but you won’t be able to test anything out until the WoW: Forever goes live next week.
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Most of the changes fit that ethos: orcs, for example, won’t have an increased critical strike chance but increased pet damage for warlocks and hunters. The skyborne, the new blue elves, had their absurdly powerful Read Leyline ability that makes them regenerate health and mana faster than anyone else cut in half. It’s still good, but not broken good.
And then there are the tauren, the bipedal bovines who have been in WoW since the beginning, who have apparently discovered nitrous oxide.
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Blizzard has blessed the tauren with a passive that increases your movement speed the longer you stay in motion. Plainsrunning was already strong as a way to move 30% faster than everyone else in the game, but the new patch doubles it to 60%. With enough time to gain speed, tauren will be as fast as the mounts you have to pay hundreds of gold for.
I kind of admire how much Blizzard is leaning into this idea, even if it costs tauren some minor damage buffs. There’s a long-running joke among WoW players that playing a tauren makes you move slower. This is because they’re so huge that their run animation just looks like they’re moving in slow-motion compared to the rest of the cast. Now, the joke’s on us, I guess.
Setting aside taurens growing wheels, messing with racial abilities this close to launch is brave. Blizzard intends to regularly balance WoW: Forever, but this is the kind of foundational stuff it won’t be able to touch without pissing a ton of people off. Even if most people probably won’t have the tier lists open for the best race/class combinations, they will still inevitably influence what kind of meta materializes for high-end PvP and raiding.