Good evening and welcome to Azeroth After Dark. I'm Lyra, your resident lore keeper, and tonight the whole lineup comes from the WoW Forever beta. And I'm Durgan Stoutbrew, the dwarf who was there for the original launch and never quite left. Forever is its own game, not Classic, and I've been poking at it all week. Icy Veins reports that Blizzard has updated the Tauren Cultivation racial on the Forever beta to stop bots harvesting high level herbalism nodes.

Lyra, here's the bit that made me laugh into my ale. Bots were death running all the way to Winterspring at low level to duplicate Mountain Silversage, Icecap and Black Lotus. Wait, at a level 20 cap? Those reagents are basically useless right now, aren't they? Completely useless on a beta capped at 20. Icy Veins makes the point that it shows how far botters will go to manipulate an economy that doesn't even exist yet.

So here's the fix in Blizzard's own words. Cultivation now has a player level requirement for every herb, equal to the herb's required level divided by five. Which in plain dwarf means you're level 60 before you touch the good stuff. Anything above 300 herbalism skill needs player level 60. And there's a sweetener for honest herbalists. The cooldown went from 23 hours to one hour, so your next play session, that racial is actually usable.

That's the modern game doing something better, and I'll say it out loud. Icy Veins is fair about it too, this won't extinguish botting, but it's progress in a never ending war. From fighting antisocial bots to encouraging actual friends. Wowhead has a blue post about how quest items drop when you're in a group in Forever. This one's my beat. Classic developer Josh Greenfield, better known as Aggrend, posted it on X, and he says the short answer is no, they're not changing how quest drops work.

But then he says they did something cool. What is it, exactly? Under the hood functionality that more predictably round robins quest items to people who are grouped. His example is one guy with eight of ten furbolg butts and another with one. He's careful with the wording, though. He calls it not pure round robin, more like bad luck protection if you haven't seen a drop in a while and others are pulling ahead.

Aye, and he says they're still dialing it in. It'll still take time, just like vanilla, but less feast or famine, and you'll kill things much faster. Durgan, does that break the vanilla feel for you? You're the one who lived the original grind. Not a bit. He says the grind is part of the vanilla magic they're maintaining, they're just smoothing the awkward moment where you tell the group to go on without you.

He also mentions the Recent Allies feature, so you're likely to keep running into the same people in later sessions. His words, you might even make a friend. Make a friend, then go stand in the dark together. Which, Lyra, is a lovely excuse for our last story. It is. Also on the Forever beta, Icy Veins found a quick quest in Duskwood that rewards a toy called the Night Watchman's Torch. Where do we find it?

Raven Hill is not a place I stroll through for fun. Behind the biggest building in Raven Hill, next to an outhouse, there's sometimes the corpse of a slain Night Watch Guard. Interacting starts a quest called An Unfortunate End. Sometimes? So he's not always up. That's the kind of detail that saves you a wasted run. Correct, Icy Veins warns he may not always be there. The toy is purely cosmetic, it lasts five minutes with a 30 second cooldown, and it does give an actual light source.

Any catches? I know there's always a catch with the fun ones. So that's your next beta session, a Tauren racial worth pressing, quest groups that feel fairer, and a torch to carry into the dark. Two of those are Blizzard nudging people to play together, which is the part of the old game I missed most. Thanks to Icy Veins and Wowhead for tonight's reporting. The full posts are linked with this episode, and remember it's all beta and still being dialed in.

Keep your torch lit out there, and good night.