World of Warcraft: Forever is reworking class talents, and Lead Software Engineer Nora Mills used the World of Warcraft: Forever What’s Next panel at BlizzCon 2026 to explain the thinking. She pointed back to 2005 and 2006, when the class team redesigned the Priest, Mage, Hunter, and Druid trees. “The changes they made back then weren’t really about making every class equally good at everything,” she said. “Rather, they wanted each class to feel unique.”
Forever follows the same approach, according to Mills: “We want to cover gaps where they exist, but we don’t want to erase what makes each class unique.” Paladins were the example. A new seal lets them tank more effectively, healers may find talents that enable “just a bit” of group healing, and for Retribution Paladins, she said, “maybe now is your time to shine.”
The team has moved away from talents that only give small incremental improvements. “We’ve instead tried to give you talents that you notice,” Mills said, with builds that involve “real meaningful trade-offs” depending on how you want to play your character.
The slide showed a Paladin talent window with Holy, Protection, and Retribution trees, plus Primary and Secondary tabs at the top of the panel that Mills did not explain. She said more detail is coming in tomorrow’s WoW Forever Deep Dive panel.