WoW: Forever beta opens its doors, with a day-one known issues list and a firm GPU cutoff

The World of Warcraft: Forever beta is open. After a queue of players spent most of 17 September refreshing the launcher, Community Manager Kaivax confirmed that the team was working through a couple of final issues before letting everyone in.

Some hours (and a couple of hundred forum replies) later came the update everyone wanted, along with a rather honest description of how the launch actually went.

The opening came with a known issues list, a news article about graphics card support and a handful of practical answers for players who could not get in at all. Here is all of it.

Your graphics card needs a 2012-or-newer architecture

The biggest single reason some players cannot install the beta is not a bug. Blizzard published an article on 17 September explaining that WoW: Forever drops support for GPUs built on older graphics architectures, and Kaivax pointed players to it in a thread from someone whose installer refused to proceed.

According to the article, your GPU must be based on one of these microarchitectures or anything newer:

• AMD Graphics Core Next 1 (2012)
• NVIDIA Maxwell (2014)
• Intel Skylake (2015)

The reason is the new visual look. WoW: Forever relies on RGBA16F UAV support in compute shaders, a GPU feature introduced around 2012, and Blizzard says requiring it also gives players a more consistent experience. Cards that lack it are described as falling well below the game's minimum hardware requirements anyway, and Blizzard notes that the vast majority of players already use compatible hardware.

Blizzard gave examples on both sides of the line:

• Compatible: AMD Radeon HD 7850 (2012), NVIDIA GeForce GTX 9xx and 750/750 Ti (2014), Intel HD Graphics 530 (2015)
• Unsupported: AMD Radeon HD 6950 (2010), NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760/770/780 and GTX 8xxM (2014), Intel HD Graphics 6000 (2015)

The article stresses, in bold italics no less, that even the compatible examples are still well below the game's minimum requirements. They will launch the game; that is not the same as running it well. The full minimum system requirements are listed on the World of Warcraft: Forever product page in the Battle.net Shop.

The NVIDIA list is the one to read carefully. What counts is the architecture, not how expensive or how high-numbered the card is, which is why a GTX 750 Ti makes the cut while the GTX 780 above it does not. Laptop owners with a GTX 8xxM chip should not assume they are safe either.

If you do not know what is in your PC, Blizzard suggests two ways to check in Windows:

• Open Settings, select System, then Display, and choose Advanced display to see your GPU's make and model.
• Open Device Manager and expand Display adapters to see the installed graphics hardware.

If your card is older than the cutoff, the article is blunt: you will need to upgrade before playing WoW: Forever.

The day-one known issues list

Kaivax opened the beta with a known issues list dated September 18, 2026, and promised to update it as issues are fixed or found.

A day later he added five more entries, which we have folded into the sections below.

A good chunk of the list is already marked as fixed in the next beta build, so if you hit one of those, the cure is simply waiting for the next patch.

Fixed in the next beta build

• Waylaid Crates do not work on items whose maximum stack size is smaller than the quantity the crate requires.
• Waylaid Crate: Apprentice Curiosities refuses Greater Magic Essence and incorrectly lets you target Lesser Magic Essence instead.
• Escaping Ban'ethil in Teldrassil: Sentinel Lynessa Duskblossom runs a bit too fast and spams her Strike ability.
• Starshards, the Night Elf Priest racial, does not benefit from the Twilight Focus talent.
• Vengeance, the Retribution Paladin talent, can activate from periodic critical strikes.
• Holy Strike: ranking it up "doesn't feel great per rank", in Blizzard's own words. It is unusual to see a balance complaint filed as a known issue, but it means Holy Strike's per-rank values change in the next build.
• Create Firestone Ranks 3 and 4 do not show the conjured item part of their tooltips.
• Coldridge Valley does not reveal on the map when explored.

The two Waylaid Crate entries are worth knowing about if you are trying out the new crate deliveries early: some of them currently cannot be completed at all, so do not burn materials on them until the fix lands.

Character sheet and pet information (work in progress)

The character pane is clearly still being built, and several of these entries only affect what the sheet displays rather than how the game actually calculates things.

• Character pane does not display Level, Class or Titles.
• Warlock pets do not show Mana as a resource on the character sheet and do not mention the scaling they get from their master.
• Warlock pets do not show the correct Health scaling from Stamina on the character sheet.
• Pet Hit chance for both Hunter and Warlock pets does not show the master's scaling coefficient.
• Pet Expertise is not displayed for Hunters or Warlocks.
• Pet Movement Speed on the character sheet does not show the correct base values in yards per second.

Glancing blows (work in progress)

• Casters: the chance of a glancing blow is wrong at all levels, and so is the damage reduction a glancing blow applies.
• Melee: the damage reduction from glancing blows is wrong against targets higher level than you. The glancing chance itself is correct at all levels for melee, and the reduction against equal-level targets is correct; only the penalty against higher-level targets is off.
• Character sheet: because of the above, the glancing blow chances it shows are not accurate.

If you are doing damage testing against higher-level targets in the beta, keep this one in mind before drawing conclusions about melee numbers.

Combat and class bugs

• Armor stacking: armor bonuses from consumables and buffs are multiplied by Bear Form armor bonuses. Bear tanks will look sturdier than they should until this is fixed.
• On-next-attack abilities: queueing Heroic Strike, Cleave or Raptor Strike disables your spell queue window.
• Arcane Missiles: taking damage while channeling fires a full-damage bolt instead of one with truncated damage.
• Cooldown Manager: still a work in progress, and how completely it is implemented varies from class to class.

Note that two of these currently work in the player's favour (Bear Form armor and Arcane Missiles), so treat any tanking or Arcane results from this build with some suspicion.

Interface, social and everything else

• Barber chairs cause a LUA error.
• Character friends are disabled in the beta.
• Minimap may sit partially off the screen.
• Legacy system: you can open it with the "Y" hotkey before reaching level 25, which produces LUA errors on tabs 1 and 3.
• Guild charters may not accept signatures. As a temporary workaround, Blizzard now allows you to hand in a guild charter with no signatures (work in progress).
• Resurrection sickness has the wrong duration at lower levels.

The Legacy entry confirms in passing that the system is meant to unlock at level 25. Pressing Y early will not hurt anything, but it will not show you anything useful either; you can browse the perks on our Legacy page in the meantime.

Two licenses, one Battle.net account

One thread came from a player whose dad had bought beta access on a separate WoW account under the same Battle.net account, only for the second login to disconnect the first. Kaivax suggested a possible workaround, though he framed it as a question rather than a confirmed fix.

The idea is to create a PTR account from the Games & Subscriptions section of the Battle.net account page and see whether logging in then offers a choice of accounts, letting each person use a different one. If you share a Battle.net account with someone, it is worth a try, and worth reporting back in that thread whether it works.

A launcher that will not load anything

In the busy "Unable to launch WoW Forever" thread, Kaivax cleared up a misconception first: the beta discussion forum is open to everyone with an active WoW subscription, so being able to post there does not mean your beta access is active.

For players whose Battle.net App shows "Oops! Something went wrong." for every game, he shared a personal fix, with the caveat that he is not tech support: after a power cut once corrupted a file, deleting the entire Data subfolder inside his World of Warcraft folder let the app patch the game again. Expect a full re-download if you try it.