So Blizzard just dropped the least surprising secret of all time with the official announcement of Classic Plus or WoW Forever as it’s named!

So let’s talk the economy

One of the main goals of WoW: Forever seems to be to deliver a classic like experience that is not a solved game. To that end there are sweeping changes to itemization, drops, new dungeons and a ton of new profession recipes.

Realmless and the AH?

One big change is that realms are gone. You pick your server type and you are on the “PvE” realm or the PvP one. This means you will have a lot of competition on the AH, as I expect WoW Forever will have a quite large launch population. It also strongly suggests to me that we will be getting the retail version of the Auction House. I would be very surprised if their backend can handle this many players on the old AH structure. That is obviously a bit sad for those of us who like the opportunities the old AH affords with pricing, but we will have to survive.

New recipes galore

There are 600 new recipes in Forever, including stuff like buff food that gives a 5 % experience buff. It’s also possible we see stuff similar to the supply crate turn ins from SoD as there were some pictures that mentioned durotar supply on the reveal stream, which was a MASSIVE goldmaker in SoD. Some of the recipes are related to the new camping feature, and will give useful buffs for being out in the world. Overall It looks like there are quite a few relevant items for most players.

Altaholic land

The legacy system as well as all the class changes will likely lead to a LOT of alts being leveled. Blizzard are also adding and updating a lot of leveling crafted items. I expect the sum total of these two changes is that various leveling upgrades from professions will be EXTREMELY good long term. Players will want to dump gold into boosting their characters.

Transmog

Transmog being enabled will also be a completely new classic market. I expect we will stuff like the platekini sets like Glorious plate be very sought after as they can only drop from a few mobs. This will be some interesting new markets that will make their debut in the pure classic version of the game.

Legacy system buffs

We’ve seen a preview of the legacy system buffs, and there are profession related ones, and they are quite relevant. Luremaster will be necessary to get optimal gold per hour from fishing, and Master Chef will absolutely be necessary to make profit with cooking as we will be on megaservers. The other buffs are more nice to have saving you a bit of gold while leveling professions as well as increasing the value of the box turn-ins.

So what are the winners?

Until the beta is out we don’t know, but assuming they stick to the original classic setup consumables will be massive. In general the sale rates will be very high, but so will competition. Alchemy was a massive gold maker for me throughout classic. The other winners is leveling gear as well as supply crate recipes. I expect leveling gear will be a massive market starting a couple of weeks in when players are onto their first alts. Gear is also usually better competition wise than mass crafted consumables, so I will be looking heavily into this.