World of Warcraft: Forever

Classes and races in WoW Forever

Updated 2026-09-17 · checked against Beta build 1.60.1.69893

The class lineup is the Classic nine, unchanged: Warrior, Paladin, Hunter, Rogue, Priest, Shaman, Mage, Warlock, Druid. What changed is who can play them.

Classic Era has 40 race and class combinations. Forever’s beta client has 56.

The Skyborne are two races

Every published account describes the Skyborne as one new race available to both factions. The client disagrees. There are two:

The factions are not inferred — the client files each racial as “Skyborne - Alliance - …” or “Skyborne - Horde - …”.

Four classes in common, and one each that the other cannot take — Mage for the High Order, Shaman for the Windshapers. They also appear as two separate player factions in the client’s faction table.

That is not a cosmetic split. If you are buying the race unlock to play a Skyborne Mage you are buying an Alliance character, and no published source tells you that. The two races also differ on one racial ability — the detail is on the Skyborne.

Both can be Druids, which until now was Night Elf and Tauren only. The Skyborne are the first new Druid race in the Classic line.

The six announced combinations, all confirmed

Blizzard named six new race and class pairings, and the client has all six exactly as stated:

Dwarf Shaman · Gnome Priest · Human Hunter · Orc Mage · Troll Warlock · Undead Paladin

Six announced plus ten Skyborne — five classes each — is the sixteen that takes 40 to 56.

The full matrix

Troll is now the widest race in the game at seven classes, tied with Human.

Racials were redesigned

Every race gets two active and two passive abilities. That is a structural change — vanilla racials were a scattered mix of one to four, mostly passive — and it means twenty years of “which race for which class” reasoning is void.

The client carries forty racial abilities across all ten races, four each, with names and descriptions — so the redesign is confirmed and readable rather than transcribed. Human, for instance, keeps Will to Survive and Perception as actives and gains Sword Specialization and The Human Spirit as passives.

The Skyborne page carries their four in full. A page for the other eight races is the next thing we write; until then we are not reprinting the partial lists circulating from show-floor footage.

Talent points, and a correction worth carrying here

Class talent points are capped at 51, unchanged, and the client stores that ceiling as a hard maximum. The Legacy talent Talented does not raise it — it starts your points at level 8 instead of 10, so you run two ahead through the middle of levelling and finish level.

Most coverage reports Talented as granting extra talent points. It does not, and the Legacy page explains where that came from, including our own earlier version of it.

What nobody knows yet

• Whether the two Skyborne share a starting experience on Zephras Isle or get separate ones.
• Racial cooldowns. The client stores descriptions, not timings, so no racial on any race has a published cooldown.
• Whether class balance changed beyond racials. Blizzard describe themselves as deliberately more conservative than Season of Discovery — “we certainly made some unique changes to them while still preserving what makes each class special” — which is a statement of intent, not a changelog.
• Anything about a Paladin rework, which one aggregator asserts and nobody else mentions.