The Latest WoW: Forever Racial Changes Aren't That Serious

On October 26th, Blizzard posted one more pass on racial abilities and traits for
WoW: Forever, two weeks out from launch. The numbers in it are tiny — a percent of critical strike here, a couple of seconds of cooldown there — and Reddit and the forums have responded as though someone deleted a class.

The changes are not nothing. But they are not the thing that should be deciding
your character either.

The Changes By Race

These land on top of the October 15 pass, which is where most of the unpopular
versions came from — the ones that replaced weapon skills with flat crit.

• Human — Ruthless drops to 1% crit (was 2%), while Human Spirit doubles to
  +10% Spirit (was 5%).
• Dwarf — Earth Fury is removed entirely. Artisan's Precision takes its place: +1% hit with spells and attacks.
• Tauren — Plainsrunning is now 2% per stack to a 60% cap (was 1% to 30%),
  but it no longer touches mounted speed. Endurance is back to plain 5% health, with no hit or crit modifiers.
• Orc — Savage is removed. Command returns, for +5% Warlock and Hunter pet damage. Blood Fury's cooldown drops to 2 minutes (was 3).
• Troll — Berserking lasts 15 seconds (was 10).
• Undead — Touch of the Grave's internal cooldown drops to 15 seconds (was
  25).
• Skyborne — Wind-Blessed drops to 2% haste (was 3%). Read Leyline now gives +50% health and mana regeneration, still +100% while Attuned at a ley line. Skysight is 15% movement speed (was 10%), and 30% while Charged.

The Community Outrage Is Wild

As somebody who has played world of Warcraft since original Vanilla and has absolutely loved multiple iterations of the game (Retail, SoD, Classic), I'm honestly kind of shocked to see the uproar online about these racial changes.

I'm being 100% honest when I say I have never once chosen a race based on their racial abilities. I do not care if I get a little damage boost from choosing Orc over a Troll, I don't care if Humans having an extra crowd control break means that they're better than my Night Elf in PvP. I just don't care.

I play world of Warcraft to create a character that I love, to play my role in an RPG game, and to have fun. I do not play world of Warcraft to do everything I can to get 1% more damage than my fellow guild-mates during a raid, or to be in the top 100 parsers in the world.

I will never ever ever choose a race that I don't love visually. I'm putting hundreds of hours into a game and into a character. I'm grinding for gear to put on that character. I want that character to look exactly like I want that character to look.

Should Forever Be Competitive?

I get that people play World of Warcraft for different reasons, and some of you may vehemently disagree with what I'm saying in this article, but I really hope Blizzard does not revolve this game around the opinions of min-maxers or parsers. At the end of the day, Forever is supposed to be a refresh of Vanilla World of Warcraft, and in Vanilla World of Warcraft we did not have raid logging and the insane min-maxing we have now. We just had a world we loved and a character that we created to be a part of that world.

This game is supposed to be a love letter to the original player-base in 2004. It should not cater to the competitive community, and to me Retail and it’s Mythic+ dungeons and numerous Raid Tiers should be the home for that competitive community.

Can We Try To Have Fun?

At the end of the day I'm sure this isn't the last set of changes we will see for racial abilities, so if you base your race on the stat bonuses right now, you may get stuck with a character that you visually don't love and stats that end up changing down the road anyways.

I think everybody's got to chill out relax and try to just simply enjoy a video game. For some of you maybe that's not possible… but I'm sorry. I'm super excited for a WoW: Forever and this racial change update did absolutely nothing to sway how I feel about the game.