Official WoW Forever podcast, episode 5: our summary

Launch raids: Barrow Deeps (10 players), Hyjal Summit (20 players), Onyxia's Lair (40 players), the last one as the throwback where everyone comes along.

Barrow Deeps and Hyjal Summit are brand new raids, with more than 20 new bosses between them. The older raids are held back for now.

The team's commitment: keep providing 10 and 20-player content patch after patch, without shuffling raid sizes.

Target difficulty is relaxed: some strategy and kill order to work out, but a prepared group with dungeon gear, potions and a flask or two should succeed.

Mechanics stay simple but can kill you on their own if you ignore them, without wiping the whole raid.

Voice chat is helpful but not required: the in-game ping system, text-to-speech and speech-to-text help coordination and accessibility.

Boss hints in Barrow Deeps: a fight where a damage buff comes at a cost (chase the meter and you die), and a pair of spiders.

In Hyjal Summit: an undead crocolisk-like wild god. You alternate between fighting its husk and the spirit possessing it.

One of the new raids has what the team called a body horror boss fight. No details.

Raid boss names are not announced, but some appear in the Legacy system.

Molten Core: described as revamped or reimagined at BlizzCon. The team hinted that its fights won't be the same, nothing more for now.

Teaser for the far future: manors and other instance portals hidden around the world that players have spotted point to content to come.

The beta only had 4 of the 9 new dungeons, and no raids: the rest was tested internally only.

New dungeons were built to feel like they belong next to the original ones: low complexity, adventure first (locked doors with several solutions, keys, a rogue to pick a lock).

Existing dungeons are mostly left as they were. Some quests and objectives inside them differ, and changes later are not ruled out.

New dungeon and raid maps were locked during the beta so nobody could load into them early.

Besides rulesets, the only hard line is the region. Playing across regions is not how launch works; never say never for later.

A preferred language setting places you with players of your language when possible. It's not a hard line: you can still group with anyone in your region.

Physical servers still exist. Oceanic players are kept on their own hardware for a better ping.

Layering mixes familiar faces with new ones on purpose, rather than only placing you with friends. It will keep changing; a tech episode on it is planned.

The beta tested the foundations: classes, camping, the server infrastructure. It was capped at level 30.

The two weeks before launch are used to move to the live hardware (the beta ran elsewhere), set up the rulesets and keep polishing from beta feedback.

Name reservation opens the following week for upgrade pack owners.

The level cap stays at 60. Content will be added to the leveling journey and to the end game over time.

One of Blizzard's biggest betas ever: concurrency caps had to be raised several times on the first day.

Datamined items are often not meant for WoW Forever: every WoW version shares assets and code. The team steps in when wrong conclusions spread.

Items stay hidden in the data until a player finds them. The team wants players to discover drops together.

The night torch from Duskwood was switched off in the first beta week, then released. City guards now carry torches at night, an idea that came from players.

Gamepad support: the team plays with a controller, dungeons and healing included. Built with help from the Diablo team.

Campfires hurting players: the team is looking at how campfire damage works, without removing it entirely.

Weather and sound: rain sounds different indoors, for example on the roof of the Goldshire inn.

The community PvP tournament got a new 1v1 arena early.

Quest items in groups: loot already rotates between members. Sharing quest drops with the whole group is not ruled out.