WoW: Forever hid 12,500 items from dataminers, and beta players are finding the weird ones

The first few hours of the World of Warcraft: Forever beta look almost exactly like the game it is rebuilding. That changes once players hit the beta's level 20 cap and start pulling apart dungeon loot, because some of the new items do things vanilla WoW never allowed.

The rule-breakers

PC Gamer points to an axe dropped by an enemy in the Deadmines that lets you mine ore without having the mining skill, for a limited number of uses. Stack a few and you can skip a gathering profession entirely and run two crafting professions instead, which in 2004 was a luxury almost nobody had.

There is also the Coldflame Saber, found in Shadowfang Keep, which makes melee attacks deal fire damage to frozen targets. That is a deliberate invitation to play a mage in melee range, a build that would have got you removed from a group in the original game. A Cozy Sleeping Bag lifted from Season of Discovery has also surfaced: three minutes in it grants a 3% experience buff that stacks with the 5% from cooking.

Why nobody saw them coming

Blizzard deliberately shipped a large share of Forever's new items without their data, so dataminers could see that thousands of items existed but not what they were. Roughly 40% of items in the game - more than 12,500 of them - went out without readable stats, and information about each one propagates to other players only once someone actually finds it.

Why it matters

Classic WoW's entire culture runs on knowing the game before you play it: the spreadsheets, the databases, the optimal route. Forever launches on November 4, and Blizzard has built it so that at least some of that knowledge has to be earned in the world first.