Blizzard opened its Forever class deep dive rollout on 30 September with Hunter and Druid. It is the first time a developer has written down what the classes actually do in this game, and it is worth reading closely rather than skimming.
Four of ten classes are documented. Priest and Warrior came in a second post the same day, and six classes have nothing. This is about the first two.
Hunter: pets get definition, traps get usable
Aimed Shot is baseline at level 20, traps can be used in combat, and pets gain definition through "Hunter gear scaling, broader ability access, and unique family abilities".
The post names one of those families: Foxes, added as a new pet family.
The framing is "giving the class more flexibility while strengthening its identity as a ranged combatant with a trusted companion at its side", across Beast Mastery, Marksmanship and Survival as pet-focused play, ranged attacks, and trap or melee options respectively.
What "broader ability access" costs a Beast Mastery
Pet ability access is the interesting one, because in original WoW a hunter picks one pet for life and its abilities are fixed by family. Broadening that, plus gear scaling that reinforces it, plus a new family, is a substantial rework of the part of the class that most defines it.
If pets become a progression axis rather than a fixed choice, then the decision "which pet do I bond with at level 10" changes character entirely. We cannot tell you how it changes until someone plays it, and we have not, so we are flagging it as the largest structural question in either post rather than predicting an answer.
Traps usable in combat is the quieter change and the easier one to underestimate. A trap that cannot be used in combat is a pull tool, and a trap you can use in combat is a combat ability, and the second version changes how a hunter fights.
Druid: forms and nature magic
The Druid section is paired with Hunter as the other half of the first post, described as adaptable forms and nature magic, and the post does not in the portion we read give a per-ability table for Druid comparable to Hunter's.
We are not going to invent one. The mechanism-level detail in this post is on the Hunter side, and the Druid framing is one sentence.
The change both classes share, and it is not in their sections
Both deep dives carry the same structural paragraph outside the class sections, and it is the part that affects every class:
"Starting at level 10, talents become available and keep the familiar structure, including the same number of rows and one-point milestone talents at 11, 21, and 31 points, now joined by a new 16-point milestone."
Plus: some talents "remain exactly as they were in patch 1.12", some were adjusted, and Blessing of Kings and Improved Mark of the Wild, which were talents, are now baseline for the classes that had them.
That last line is the one that quietly devalues points, and it is why the tree looking identical is a trap. See our talents guide for the full argument.
What we cannot tell you
Whether pets work. Whether Foxes are good. Whether the forms are recognisable. We have not played any of it, all four deep dives carry Blizzard's warning that abilities and talents "may continue to evolve throughout the beta test", and this is 33 days before launch.
The specific thing we would want tested first by anyone with a beta: whether a pet you bond with at level 10 is still that pet at 60, because "broader ability access" reads as though it might not be.
SOURCES: Blizzard's own post "World of Warcraft: Forever Class Deep Dives, Hunter and Druid", dated 30 September 2026, read from the official news page on October 2 2026. Aimed Shot at 20, Foxes as a new pet family, traps in combat, the three specs and the shared talent-structure paragraph are quoted or transcribed from it. Our reading of what broadening pet ability access implies is our own inference, labelled as such. We did not read the Druid section in detail and are not summarising it. Related: the class deep dives in full, the Priest and Warrior read, and the verification hit list.