World of Warcraft, through a designer’s eyes

Same world.
New
perspective.

An archive of studies about what makes
Azeroth feel like Azeroth.

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Studies & speculations by Mattia

Featured studyBrandcrafting / 005

A Drustvar wicker effigy with red cloth and an antlered skull under a dark sky

Art direction / Speculation

Witch palette.

Game imagery. A different frame of reference.

01 / 03

05 open studies / 02 in developmentLore in context. Design with intent.Scroll to the archive

An ongoing collection / 01

The studies.

Looking closer at the world we play in.
One idea at a time.

Read the study005

Brandcrafting / 005Full study

Another corner of the same world.

Behind the archive

Less taking
it for granted.
More looking.

I’m Mattia, an art director who spends a lot of time thinking about Azeroth.

This is where those thoughts become studies. The identity of a class. The feeling of a place. How a new idea could belong in a world we already know.

Start with the Shaman About this site

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Brandcrafting / 003

Witch, a heritage brand waiting for its launch.

The Old Ways,
and the rites they kept quiet.

Every time I think about a Witch class I end up in Gilneas, with the Old Ways pushed towards death and blood out in the darkness of the Blackwald, using the ritual magic we later saw in Drustvar.

New classClass identitySpeculation

Supplied in-game screenshot of a robed witch casting blue and black magic

Visual reference

SeriesBrandcrafting

DisciplineClass fantasy & visual identity

StatusOriginal fan concept

SettingForever / Proposed class

01 / The fantasy

What if Gilneas
went further?

Wild theory: what if the worgen curse wasn't the only weapon Gilneas turned to against the undead?

The Old Ways were already there, a folk magic of harvest rites and charms older than the kingdom itself. Picture a few harvest-witches taking those rites into necromancy and blood magic to fight the dead with their own weapons, because that's the Gilnean story my Witch comes out of.

I've been posting about this theory on X for days, and I loved the way people reacted to it, so I decided to take it further. It's turned into a series, because I couldn't squeeze all the branding into one article. To be honest, I don't think Blizzard will ever go down this road. If Forever gets a new class at all, my bet is on a classic-style Death Knight, much more of a spellcaster than the plate warrior Wrath gave us. But the Witch was a lot of fun to explore, and after all the digging she's a class I'd happily play.

I've played since 2006 and I'm an art director by trade, and when I look at a Warcraft class I see a brand: a name, a colour, a silhouette, the materials it's made of and the way it talks. So I treated this one like a job for a client, and here's my analysis of a possible Forever class, the Witch.

I'll start with the evidence and join the dots one by one, and then we get to the fun part.

The idea in one line

Every good brand can be said in a sentence, and mine for the Witch is this: the spell lives somewhere you can see.

She keeps her magic inside a thing, a bundle of sticks and bone tied with red cloth or an old book of rites, and you could walk up to it and point at the place where the harm is kept. That scares me a lot more than anything a Mage throws out of his hands.

Blackwald forest with blue illumination and red undergrowth — Visual reference

02 / Lore and limits

Nine things
that got me here.

None of this is confirmed. These are the dots in the order I found them, and once you see them side by side it's hard not to draw the line.

Canon

The Old Ways.

Gilneas has its own folk magic, the Old Ways, taught by Celestine of the Harvest to witches who call themselves druids. Every autumn Gilneans throw branches into a burning wickerman to let go of whatever weighs on them. The game only shows it to us as nature magic, but when a tradition already builds figures out of wicker and burns them for the good of the soul, I can't help wondering whether death and blood were in there too. ^{S4, S5, S16}

Canon

Gilneas has already used a monster as a weapon.

Terrified of the Scourge, Genn let Arugal set the worgen on the undead, and it went about as badly as it could. When Gilneas is cornered it reaches for a terrible answer, and afterwards it would rather build a wall than talk about it. ^{S3, S9}

Canon

The same people, across the sea.

Kul Tiras was founded around 2,700 years ago by sailors from Gilneas, and they ran straight into the Drust and their death magic. Blizzard never calls that magic necromancy. At BlizzCon 2017 the art team called it druidic death magic, and elsewhere it's described as a more macabre version of druid magic. Much later, Drustvar gives us the Heartsbane Coven, whose effigies turn people into pigs and whose wicker bodies move because the spirits of the dead are bound inside them, and at one point they hold a whole town under a curse. The Coven itself starts with a wife at her husband's bedside. Lord Waycrest was dying, Lady Meredith called out to any power that could save him, and the one that answered was Gorak Tul, the old king of the Drust, who promised that death would never part them, for a price. The dark witch is already in the game, fully designed, and her family came from Gilneas. ^{S15, S19, S17, S6, S28, S29}

Official / Hearthstone

Hearthstone has already been to the Witchwood.

In April 2018, a few months before Battle for Azeroth took anyone to Drustvar, Hearthstone released The Witchwood, a whole expansion set in Gilneas. Its villain is Hagatha, an orc witch the cards call the curse-bringer, tree-twister and mother of wretched things. She cursed the Blackwald so badly that it became known as the Witchwood: she twisted the trees, fouled the lake, woke the Gilnean dead as restless ghosts and tore a hole into the Emerald Nightmare to let something worse through. Ben Brode said the team chose to leave the city for the woods, away from werewolves and towards ghosts and the monsters among the trees. Hearthstone tells its stories loosely, like a tale in a tavern, so I don't read it as canon. Still, Blizzard put a witch with a cauldron and a frog apprentice in the Blackwald, and printed a card called Witching Hour. ^{S23, S24, S25}

Official / Other game mode

Blizzard already ships a playable Witch.

Talebound, the roguelike mode of the modern game, has three classes, and one of them is the Witch, with a cauldron, frogs, ravens, spiders and thorns. She's a fairy-tale witch in a different mode, but it means Blizzard already has the name on the shelf with a kit attached. ^S10

Reported leak

The survey.

A leaked Blizzard survey pitched eleven possible classes for Forever, and the Witch was one of them: ranged damage and support, in cloth. Three abilities came with it, Cauldron of Menace, Voidbolt, which costs the caster's own life, and a Blood Golem. A witch who pays in blood and builds a servant out of it. Come on. ^{S11, S12}

Reported leak

Two more pitches in the same survey.

The same survey also pitched a Necromancer in cloth, with Raise Dead, Bone Spear and Corpse Explosion, and the San'layn, with Blood Bolt and Blood Mirror. That's three dark casters on a single survey, and a lot of death and blood on one table. ^S12

Datamined

Gilneas is sitting in the Forever client.

A Forever beta build carries a Battle for Gilneas, a Ruins of Gilneas zone with the Blackwald inside it, and a screen effect that only works in Gilneas, called Preternatural Darkness. When I read that name, Witching Hour came to mind straight away, the card Hearthstone printed for the Witchwood, and in a gothic folk setting like Gilneas it fits the witchcraft theme a bit too well. ^S13

Datamined

Three books and three spells.

The datamine also includes three Season of Discovery books, Bewitchments and Glamours, Sanguine Sorcery and Necromancy 101, which happens to be one for each branch of the class. Then there are spells tagged only as Other, like Recently Siphoned the Grave, Ritual Circle and Blood Sacrifice. I do love a coincidence. ^S14

The line between them

Blizzard pitched those as three separate classes, and I'd fold them into one.

Taken one at a time, each of them has a problem. A Necromancer would sit uncomfortably close to the Death Knight, and I don't want to play that fantasy again in a different armour type. The San'layn is tied so tightly to one race that I can't picture it as a class anyone could pick, and the Shadow Priest already owns the vampire's touch anyway. Then a Witch with nothing else drifts towards the Warlock, all curses and souls and not much of her own. Put them together, though, and you get Effigy, Necromancy and Heartstitch, three branches of one practice that no neighbouring class can claim.

It took me a while to see the other thing these dots share: nobody in this story picks up death magic because they want to. The Drust reached for it when they were losing the war against the settlers, and it led them to Thros. Meredith Waycrest reached for it at her husband's bedside, and Gilneas let the worgen loose when the Scourge was at the Wall. Every time, somebody is cornered first, and my Witch would be one more of them.

What the Old Ways kept quiet

Here's where I get properly speculative. My theory is that death and blood were part of the Old Ways from the start, the same way winter is part of the harvest, and nobody talked about them. Witches like Celestine, who chose the kinder side of the craft, rarely used those rites and frowned on anyone who did, but they were there all the same, written in the margins of the old books.

Gilneas is the kind of place where something like that stays hidden. It's a closed kingdom behind a wall, where everyone knows everyone and the neighbours whisper about the strange woman at the edge of the Blackwald who ties little figures out of sticks. In a village like that the old witches could know every blood rite and grave rite and still never touch them, partly because they were too prudish and partly because they were scared of what people would say.

Kul Tiras is the other half of it. Gorak Tul taught Meredith the death magic himself, that much is canon. What I keep asking is why it spread through the women of Drustvar so fast, and my answer is that he was planting in ground someone had already dug. If the Old Ways sailed across with the first Gilnean settlers, he only had to take the quiet half of the craft and corrupt it until it became the Heartsbane Coven. Which means that when Gilneas needed a darker answer to the Scourge, it didn't have to borrow one from strangers. The answer was already in the family and had grown up on the other side of the sea.

The Witchwood and Drustvar

This is where the dots start joining up on their own. Drustvar and the Witchwood came out in the same year, and they look like pages from the same sketchbook: wicker and scarecrows, cauldrons and crows, twisted trees, and witches who work with whatever the dead leave behind. Blizzard Watch spotted it at the time and read the Witchwood's witchcraft as a bridge to the hags of Drustvar, whose whole folklore runs on fear. Nobody at Blizzard has said the two shared a brief, so this part is my reading, but I've written enough briefs to recognise one. ^S26

My favourite thread is the Nightmare. Hagatha's curse opens the Blackwald up to the Emerald Nightmare, and the Drust, on the other side of the sea, drew their power from Thros, the Blighted Lands, a dead and rotting realm tied to that same Nightmare. So the witch who cursed the forest of Gilneas and the Drust who corrupted the witches of Kul Tiras were drinking from the same well. If the class ever needs a lore reason for the dark half of the Old Ways waking up in both kingdoms, that's the one I'd give it. ^{S24, S27, S19}

The survey's WitchEffigyFolk magic, used to do harm

The survey's NecromancerNecromancyThe harvest rite, aimed at the grave

All that bloodHeartstitchA healing rite that runs on blood

I'd bet Gilneas survived behind the Wall partly by trying things it buried afterwards.

What they told the children

Every closed village needs a story to keep its children out of the woods, and I like to imagine the one Gilnean parents told about the Blackwald. Almost every detail in it comes from what Drustvar shows us about the Heartsbane Coven, and the wood it warns about is the same one Hearthstone would turn into the Witchwood. The only thing I've invented is who's telling it. ^{S17, S18, S19, S23}

Don't go past the red thorns, love. There's a woman in the Blackwald who ties sticks together with red thread, and every little figure she makes is waiting for a soul. If she catches your eye you'll walk home with blue light behind yours, and you'll do whatever she tells you. She turned the miller's boy into a pig, they say, and she stitches what's left of dead men and dead beasts into new things that walk on two legs. On windy nights she sends her wicker giants through the trees, and it's the spirits of the dead that move them. She never falls ill, she never cries, fire won't take her, and if you throw her in the river she floats. Only silver and rowan will keep her off. So you stay where the lamps are lit.

Read it again as a designer and it's half a brief already. The fetish, the stitched beasts, the wicker giants and the blue light in the eyes give an art team most of what it needs.

And Celestine?

The game tells us harvest-witches always called themselves druids, but a Gilnean druid before the curse has nothing to do with the kaldorei kind. There's no Emerald Dream in her life yet and no Elune, and both only arrive with the worgen and the night elves who come to help. Forever is set before all of that. ^{S4, S5}

So in this timeline Celestine is what she has always been, a witch of the Old Ways who knows the rites of life and the rites of death and walks between the two. She says it herself: "only the earth and her secrets will remain". The Thornspeakers of Drustvar are druids too, descended from the same Drust who mastered death magic, so a druid who understands both ends of the cycle is nothing new for Warcraft. ^{S7, S19}

And if she never becomes a druid in this timeline, I'd say she was a Witch all along.

What Forever allows

Forever sits after Forsaken Kingdom and before Molten Core, with nine classes and a level 60 cap, which makes it a quieter world than the modern game. ^{S1, S2}

That matters for the look. A Forever class needs simple visuals, and Night Fae magic would be far too flashy for the world they're building. Drust magic fits much better, heavy and dim, made of wood and cold light.

I'm RP-biased, I know. I love anything that pulls you deeper into the world you're playing in, and this class is made of that from the fetish up.

Sources and what belongs to this concept

Dots one to three are Warcraft lore. Dot four is Hearthstone, which tells its stories more loosely than the main game, and dot five is an official game mode. Six and seven come from a leaked survey. Eight and nine are from the Forever beta client, and the three spell names are my own reading of the files. Blizzard has announced none of it. The Witch circle, the Blackwald story, the specs and every spell on this page are my concept.

03 / Class identity

The class
and its three specs.

Proposed class

Witch

Ranged damage and support / Cloth

Coven burgundy
#9E2B4E / class colour

Where it sits in the range

Every caster in Warcraft can be summed up with a single verb.

WarlockBargains with demons and the Fel

MageStudies Arcane magic

PriestChannels faith

ShamanCommunes with elements and spirits

DruidParticipates in the natural order

WitchWorks by hand, with rites, ingredients, sacrifice and old superstition

That last line is the whole class, because nobody else on this list does their magic by hand the way she does.

She borrows from her neighbours, of course: the Druid's Old Ways, the Warlock's slow afflictions, the Shaman's habit of planting things in the ground, the Death Knight's blood and dead. What none of them has is the Fetish, a bundle of wood, bone and cloth that she summons into the ground to weaken every enemy around it. I think of it as a Shaman totem turned round to face the enemy.

In practice you summon the Fetish, put the Evil Eye on someone and make them fight inside it, and that's most of the class right there.

Three specialisations, nine spells

All three specs share one habit, which is tying someone to an object and then working on them through it. Hover over the icons to read the spells. The names mix what the survey and the datamine gave us with a few of my own.

DPS / 01

Effigy

The fetish and the evil eye.

Base witchcraft from forces nobody wants to name: a fetish in the ground and the evil eye on an enemy.

Witchbolt

Summon Fetish

Evil Eye

DPS / 02

Necromancy

The dead, put to work.

The harvest rite turned on the grave, raising one servant from bone and remains to fight beside her.

Raise Dead

Siphon the Grave

Recently Siphoned the Grave

Support / Healing / 03

Heartstitch

Blood as thread.

Healing paid for in the Witch's own blood, stitched out of her body and into someone who needs it.

Cauldron of Menace

Blood Sacrifice

Transfusion

Hover, tap or tab to an icon to read the spell. The icons come from the game, borrowed for the concept, and some have been recoloured into the Witch palette.

Once I laid the survey names and the datamined names out next to mine, they slotted into the three branches without any pushing, and that was the moment this stopped feeling like a guess.

Witch... for the Horde!

The Horde has had its witch for years, it just calls her a witch doctor. Hagatha from the Witchwood shows that an orc shaman can be a witch, and Warcraft's troll lore comes with potions, fetishes, wax dolls, hexes and the loa, which is more or less the same toolkit. What fascinates me is that the two stereotypes share a root in the real world. "Witch doctor" is an English phrase, first written down in 1718 for the village healer who protected people from witches, and only later pinned onto African healers. The pin-stuck doll most people call a voodoo doll is really a European poppet, with no place in Haitian Vodou. A troll Witch and a Gilnean Witch are much closer cousins than they look, so they get a study of their own. ^{S22, S20, S21}

How it should talk

Naming is branding, and Warcraft is strict about it: specialisations get a single plain word, like Affliction, Feral or Frost. Each of the Witch's three needed to pass that test and still sound as if it came from the same village.

Effigy is base witchcraft. I called it Witchcraft for days, but no class repeats its own name in a spec, and an effigy is an object nobody else in Azeroth owns. Its words are small and homely, like Fetish, Evil Eye and Witchbolt. English folklore helps here, because in it a witch ill-wishes you, and once she has, you've been overlooked. Nobody would ever shout words like those, and I like them for it.

Necromancy doesn't need a clever name. The word does the job and Warcraft has used it for decades, so what I'd change is the tone around it. She raises one body at a time, from remains she has carried with her, and the language stays close to the grave: Raise Dead, Siphon the Grave, and a name for the price taken straight from the datamine, Recently Siphoned the Grave.

Heartstitch is the healer, and the name tells you what she does: she sews life from one body into another and pays for it with her own blood. It keeps clear of Blood, which belongs to the Death Knight, and it sounds like it came out of a sewing basket, which is where I wanted her words to come from. Her spells are Cauldron of Menace, Blood Sacrifice and Transfusion.

A Drustvar effigy with bound branches, a skull, red fabric and a blue centre — Visual reference

04 / Visual language

How the Witch
should look.

The mark

Every class reduces to one small icon, and you can tell which is which at the size of a fingernail. The Witch's mark is an old book of rites with a bird skull resting on the cover and red cord stitched around it, holding everything together.

I chose it because every part of it belongs to a branch of the class. The book is the folk knowledge Effigy comes from, the bone is Necromancy, and the red stitch is Heartstitch holding the whole practice together, so you can read it as a Witch before any magic switches on.

Where the colours come from

Blue, black and red were already working together in the Blackwald and in Drustvar, so picking them was the easy part.

The blue-black is the Blackwald, with its dark trunks, tangled branches and cool haze. The azure is the cold light sitting inside the wicker constructs of Drustvar, the thing that tells you a body is occupied. The red is in both places, in the Blackwald undergrowth and in the cloth and markings on the effigies. For me that red is blood, and it's where Heartstitch comes from.

Bone is the neutral that holds it all together, skulls and antlers pale against the dark wood.

The spell palette. Select to copy.

Those four are for the spells. The class itself needs one more colour, the one its name wears in a raid frame, and azure is out because it's the Mage's blue, while deep blue belongs to the Shaman.

So the name gets burgundy, as a callout to the Death Knight in Retail. Anyone who has played since Wrath sees a deep red name in a raid frame and thinks Death Knight, and Forever doesn't have one, so the Witch can borrow some of that feeling. The colour still has to be hers, though. The Death Knight's red is a bright crimson, and hers is darker and cooler, closer to wine, or to blood that has dried into cloth. Side by side the two names look related, but you won't mistake one for the other. It also has to read on a dark raid frame, so the black stays in her cloth and her wood.

The class colour, for the name in a raid frame.

Materials before effects

If I had to brief an effects team in one line, it would be this: show me the material first and the light second.

Her materials are wood, cord, wax, bone and worn cloth. A Fetish should look like it was put together by someone who knows what every piece is for, with the magic sitting inside it as a small cold light. The Warlock already has green fire and purple shadow and the Mage has everything bright, so the object is where the Witch can make the look her own.

Dark wicker golem with antlers and blue light inside its torso — Visual reference

A hunched witch of Drustvar in a red hood, with candles and wicker bundled on her back — Visual reference

How it moves

I'd tell the three specs apart by how their magic moves. Effigy holds and tightens like a knot pulling shut, while Necromancy has to put something together before it can wake it up, and Heartstitch has a pulse to it, passing life along to whoever needs it. If you turned the colour off, you should still be able to tell which rite you're watching.

The test

I keep one question for everything on this site: would this feel like it belonged in Azeroth?

For the Witch my answer is yes. She has Gilneas behind her and a reason to exist, an object nobody else owns, and every new datamine adds another dot. If she ever comes to Forever, I'm rolling one on day one.

Fan concept and speculation. Witch is not announced game content.

Warcraft icon references

The icons come from the game, borrowed for the spell or specialisation named beside them. Those marked as recoloured have been colour-matched to the Witch palette, with their shapes and detail untouched.

Effigy (recoloured)
inv_sword_1h_drustvar_d_01
Witchbolt (recoloured)
inv_12_profession_thematicfoozles_moteofprimalenergy_blue
Summon Fetish
inv_archaeology_80_witch_fetishofthequestioningmind
Evil Eye (recoloured)
inv_archaeology_ogres_hargunn_eye
Necromancy (recoloured)
ability_deathknight_bonegrinder
Raise Dead (recoloured)
spell_shadow_animatedead
Siphon the Grave (recoloured)
ability_priest_touchofdecay
Recently Siphoned the Grave (recoloured)
spell_deathknight_necroticplague
Heartstitch (recoloured)
inv_misc_thread_01
Cauldron of Menace
inv_misc_cauldron_fire
Blood Sacrifice
ability_ironmaidens_bloodritual
Transfusion (recoloured)
spell_arcane_studentofmagic

End of the study

More worlds
within the world.

Back to Brandcrafting

Back to the archive

Brandcrafting / 001

Shaman has an art direction problem.

One class fantasy, too many visual languages.

LoreClass identityArt direction

01 / The brief

Cover the names and guess the class.

Put Healing Wave, Chain Heal and Riptide next to each other, cover the names, and ask someone who has never played a Shaman which class each spell belongs to.

I think most people would answer Druid for the first one, Priest or Paladin for the second, and only on the third would they finally say Shaman. Healing Wave is green and leafy, Chain Heal is a golden beam that would look at home in a cathedral, and Riptide is a column of pale water. If a client sent me those three as one product range I would assume three different agencies had worked on it and nobody had been given the brand guidelines.

That is the whole problem, and it has very little to do with which colour is the right one. I am happy with green, I am happy with water, I could even live with gold. What I can't make work as a designer is a healing kit where the three spells you press most belong to three different class fantasies, because at that point Restoration has no look of its own, only a collection of looks it borrowed.

Healing Wave

Green glow, soft Nature light, leaf-like particles.

Reads as Nature

Chain Heal

Yellow and gold, luminous, a beam of light jumping between friends.

Reads as Holy

Riptide

Pale aqua, fluid, a column of water rising around the target.

Reads as Shaman

A tauren Shaman casting Healing Wave, green light around the hands, with three totems on the ground — Reference 01 / Healing WaveGame footage

A Shaman casting Chain Heal, a golden beam of light arcing towards an ally — Reference 02 / Chain HealGame footage

Riptide on an ally, a column of pale aqua water rising around the target — Reference 03 / RiptideGame footage

The funny part is in the icons. Look at Healing Wave and Chain Heal on the bar and you will see the same green hand on two different backgrounds, which means that back in 2004 somebody at Blizzard did design these as a family. The buttons agree with each other, and then you press them and the effects go their separate ways.

Forever is the right place to bring this up. Classic Era should stay exactly as it shipped, inconsistencies included, because that is the point of it. Forever is Blizzard going back into the old world to extend it and tidy it, with new racials, new class combinations and new talents, so a small correction to three spell effects fits the brief perfectly. I am not asking for Retail water simulations or new animations either. Everything in this study can be done with a hue shift and a particle swap on effects that already exist.

So I did what I would do for any brand with a confused palette. I laid out the colours the class uses today and what each of them says, and then I built two revised palettes, one for each honest answer to the question of what Restoration is supposed to look like. A third one turned up on the way, and it is the one I ended up choosing.

02 / The colour code

Azeroth already has a colour code.

Warcraft has been teaching us to read colour since the first Frostbolt. Green is Nature, yellow is Holy, red and orange are Fire, pale blue is Frost and purple is Shadow, and after twenty years nobody needs a tooltip to know what just hit them. It is one of the best pieces of visual branding in the game, and it is the reason the Restoration kit reads the way it does, because each of its colours is already saying something very specific.

Palette one: the classic, as it ships today

These are the four colours a Restoration Shaman actually has on the bar, sampled from the references above. Three of them heal, and the fourth is the fire that sits next to them.

Leaf green

#55823D

Healing Wave, Earth Shock

Chain gold

#D9BF5F

Chain Heal

Ember

#DF8051

Flame Shock, fire totems

Tide aqua

#BAF6EA

Riptide, Water Shield

Colour	What it says	Who owns it	The neighbour it looks like
Green	Nature, growth, plants	Druid	Healing Touch
Yellow	Holy, the Light, faith	Priest and Paladin	Holy Light
Red	Fire, the element	Shared, and earned	Searing Totem
Aqua	Water, but pale enough for Frost	Shaman, with Mage next door	Frost Nova

Read as a palette, this is a spell school chart with a Shaman standing in front of it. Green tells you the school and then hands the spell to the Druid, who has owned leaves and growth since day one. Yellow tells you nothing true at all, because Chain Heal is a Nature spell wearing the colour of the Light. Red is the interesting one, because it never touches a heal and yet it is the only colour here that nobody questions. A Shaman's fire is red because fire is one of the four things a Shaman is made of, so the colour belongs to the element first and the class second, and it works.

The aqua follows the same logic, which is why Riptide feels so right. There is no Water school in the game, and Riptide is a Nature spell on paper, but nobody has ever looked at it and thought of a Druid. It reads as an element, the same way the fire does.

"But a Shaman uses all the elements"

This is the reply I see most often, that the kit is fine as it is because a Shaman works with every element and so every colour is fair game. I like the idea a lot, and I think it deserves to be taken seriously, so here are the four elements next to the colours the class gives them.

Element	How the Shaman shows it	Example	Used by a heal?
Fire	Red and orange flame	Flame Shock	No
Water	Pale aqua and blue, liquid	Water Shield	Riptide
Air	Blue-white storm	Lightning Bolt	No
Earth	Green and leafy	Earth Shock	No

The argument explains the fire and it explains the water, which are the two colours nobody was complaining about. The green is a closer call than I expected, because in Classic the Shaman's earth is green as well: Earth Shock comes out in the same leafy green as Healing Wave. So on paper the defence covers it. The catch is that it is the Druid's leafy green, used with nothing added to tell the two classes apart, so Earth Shock doesn't rescue Healing Wave, it just shares its problem. And gold is not an element at all. There is no fifth totem for sunlight, and nothing in the class fantasy that would make a Shaman's water or wind come out looking like a Paladin's blessing.

So if the defence of the kit is that it shows all the elements, it only half works. It explains the green on paper without making it look like a Shaman, and it has no answer at all for the gold. I would happily sign up for a Restoration that really did heal with the elements. It would look like water, and maybe a little like wind and earth, and it would look nothing like Healing Touch or Holy Light.

School is the category, class is the brand

The usual reply is that Healing Wave is a Nature spell, so green is correct. It is correct as a category, in the same way that two competing brands can sit on the same supermarket shelf. A spell school tells you what kind of magic something is, and it has never told the artists how it should look.

Lightning BoltShaman, Nature

WrathDruid, Nature

Lightning Bolt and Wrath are both Nature damage, and one is a blue-white crack of storm while the other is a bolt of leafy green light. Nobody has ever mixed them up, and nobody has ever complained that Lightning Bolt isn't green enough. The damage side of the class solved this in 2004. Shaman Nature there means storm, and it looks like nothing a Druid would cast, so the same school can clearly hold two brands. The healing side simply never got the same attention.

Healing Wave reads Nature, Chain Heal reads Holy, Riptide reads Shaman. That gives me two ways out: make all three look like Shaman Nature, or make all three look like Shaman water.

03 / All Nature

If the answer is Nature, make it ours.

The first route keeps everything inside the spell school and asks what Nature looks like when a Shaman is the one casting it. The good news is that Blizzard already answered that once, and most of us played through it.

01
Warcraft II
There is no chain heal here, and no Shaman either. The only spell that heals someone else is the Paladin's Healing, one target at a time. The Horde has no healer of its own: the closest it gets is the Death Knight's Death Coil, which takes life from an enemy and gives it back to the caster. Healing in Warcraft starts out as something the Light does.
02
Warcraft III
The bouncing heal arrives with the troll Shadow Hunter. His Healing Wave "calls forth a wave of energy that heals a target and bounces to nearby friendlies", in the warm yellow light people still remember. Chain Heal itself doesn't exist yet: it is a World of Warcraft spell, added in the 2004 beta. WoW split that spell in two: the name went to Healing Wave, and the bounce and the glow went to Chain Heal.
03
Patch 3.0.2 / October 2008
The Wrath of the Lich King pre-patch quietly changed Chain Heal. The patch history describes it in one line: spell graphics changed to look more nature-like and less holy.

So the gold is real heritage, and I understand why people defend it. What heritage can't do is explain what the colour means once it lands in WoW. In a strategy game with four armies, a warm glow only had to say "this unit is being healed", and it said it well. In a game with nine classes that have to be told apart at a glance, the same glow says Priest or Paladin, because by 2004 gold had become the colour of the Light. Nobody defending the current look has explained to me why a troll's voodoo and a Shaman's elements should share a colour with a cathedral, and I think that is because the honest answer is that it was inherited and never questioned.

Except that it was questioned once. I do love that last line in the list, because it means somebody at Blizzard looked at Chain Heal in 2008 and saw exactly what this study is about. Their fix was a very designer thing to do. They didn't throw the gold away and they didn't paint the whole spell leaf green. They kept a hot yellow heart in the middle of the beam and wrapped it in a bright storm green, so it still glows like the old chain but no longer looks like it came out of a Priest.

Chain Heal after patch 3.0.2, a beam with a yellow core wrapped in bright green — Reference 04 / Chain Heal after patch 3.0.2Wrath of the Lich King

Palette two: Chainlight

This palette is sampled straight from that Wrath-era Chain Heal and builds the rest of the kit around it. The outer green belongs to the same family as the Healing Wave green, and the core is the old gold turned up towards yellow, so one beam carries both of the colours the kit already had. Chainlight, the hero colour, is the band where the two meet.

Static core

#FAFE8E

The hottest point of the glow

Yellow heart

#E9DE4C

Heritage, the old gold of the chain

Chainlight

#C0FD7F

Hero colour, every heal

Storm green

#69D05D

Body of the effect, trails

Moss

#3E7E34

Shadow and falloff

Keeping it away from the Druid

Green on green only works if the two greens can't be confused, so the separation has to be deliberate, and hue alone won't do it because the storm green is close to the green a Druid uses. The difference is in the core and the shape. Druid green is botanical all the way through, and it comes with leaves, petals and things that grow. Chainlight always has that yellow heart burning in the middle, which no Druid spell has, and it should move like energy travelling along a wire and never like something sprouting.

Druid Nature

Green all the way through. Leaves, petals, blossom. Grows and unfolds.

Shaman Nature

Green with a yellow heart. Sparks, ripples, totem glyphs. Arcs and travels.

In practice Healing Wave keeps its cast, its timing and most of its green, loses the leaves and gains the yellow heart. Chain Heal is already there if Forever uses the 2008 version. Riptide is the awkward one on this route, because pale water in a yellow-green kit becomes the new odd one out, so it would keep its shape and take a Chainlight rim to tie it back to the other two.

The risk with this palette is that yellow-green is also the colour of poison, and Nature is the school of stings and venom as well as healing. The way around it is brightness. A heal should be light with a yellow-white core, and a poison is always murky and dark, so as long as Chainlight stays luminous it reads as energy and never as something you would want cleansed.

04 / Brackish water

If the answer is water, keep it away from Frost.

The second route is the one Riptide already points to, and the lore has been pointing there for much longer than Riptide has existed.

01
Canon / Original game
In Call of Water, the class quest for the water totem, Islen Waterseer puts it like this: "If there is one lesson you must learn of water, it is this: water means rebirth. Its power flows, erodes, and makes clean all manner of things."
02
Canon / Original game
The Horde version of that quest ends at a shrine in Silverpine that has been tainted by the plague. The Shaman's job is to defeat what the water has become and make the pool clean again.
03
Original game
Healing Stream Totem is a Water totem. Healing through water was on the action bar years before Riptide.
04
The Burning Crusade
Water Shield arrives, blue and liquid and unmistakably Shaman, in an art style that sits comfortably next to the 2004 effects.
05
Wrath / Forever
Riptide gives Restoration its first heal that looks like water, and Forever keeps it as the talent at the bottom of the tree.

So water as the healing element is as old as the class, and I could stop here and say make everything look like Riptide. The trouble shows up as soon as you sample it. Riptide today is a very pale aqua, close to white at its brightest, and pale blue-white is already taken. Frost has owned it since the first Mage pressed Frostbolt, and if the whole kit simply copies Riptide we trade a Druid problem for a Mage problem, where Healing Wave stops looking like Healing Touch and starts looking like Frost Armor.

Frost is water with everything taken out

The way out is to ask what kind of water a Shaman actually works with. Mage water is conjured out of nothing and frozen on the spot, so it is pure, cold, still and hard, which is why Frost lives in pale cyan and white with sharp edges. Shaman water is found, in rivers, marshes, tide pools and rain, and it has been somewhere before it reaches you. It carries silt and salt and a bit of green from whatever grows in it. That is brackish water, where the river meets the sea, and it has a colour of its own that no other class is using.

I do love a coincidence, and Call of Water has a good one. The teacher that quest sends you to, an orc Shaman living alone out in the Barrens who starts you on the path to the water totem, is called Brine.

Palette three: Brackwater

Here the hero colour keeps the hue Riptide already has, which sits between green and blue, and gives it the body it is missing, so it lands on a teal with some depth to it. Riptide's own pale aqua stays in the palette as the accent, and the highlight is a warm foam, never the white-blue of ice, which also gives me somewhere to put the Spirit side of the class as mist and pale wisps.

Foam

#E3F0E4

Highlight, mist, spirit wisps

Tidepool

#4DB5AE

Hero colour, every heal

Riptide aqua

#BAF6EA

Heritage accent, the Riptide we have today

Brackwater

#2C7C82

Body of the effect, trails

Silt

#34443F

Shadow and falloff, the earth in the water

Keeping it away from the Mage

Mage Frost

Pale cyan and pure white. Crystals, shards, hard edges. Shatters and holds still.

Shaman water

Teal with green and silt in it. Ripples, currents, mist. Flows and settles.

The rule I would give an effects artist is simple: if it could be an ice cube, it is too blue. Frost is light, clean and cold, so Brackwater has to be deeper, slightly murky and warm in its highlights, and it should always be moving. Healing Wave becomes a soft swell of Tidepool with a little foam where the leaves used to be. Chain Heal keeps its jump and its brightness and becomes a current running from one friend to the next, with a foam-white core so it stays as readable in a raid as the gold was. Riptide keeps its shape and its hue and only gets deeper, so it stops looking like ice and stops being the exception.

Retail went down the water road too. Healing Wave got a water-based animation in patch 4.0.6, and years later the whole kit followed, with surges and jets and a casting animation to match, and plenty of people said they missed the golden chain. This is a much smaller idea. It keeps the 2004 shapes and the 2004 particle count and only changes what colour the light is and what the little bits floating in it are.

05 / Side by side

Three spells, one pair of hands.

This is the cover-the-names test again, run four times. Read each column from top to bottom and ask whether those three lights could come from the same pair of hands.

Spell	Classic, today	Chainlight	Brackwater	Tide aqua + Chainlight
Healing Wave	Leaf green	Storm green, yellow heart	Tidepool	Tide aqua, Chainlight rim
Chain Heal	Chain gold	Yellow heart, storm green	Tidepool, foam core	Tide aqua, Chainlight rim
Riptide	Tide aqua	Tide aqua, Chainlight rim	Riptide aqua core, Tidepool	Tide aqua, as it is today

Colour test only. The lights show palette and temperature, they are not mock-ups of the spell effects.

The first column is three strangers, and the other three are all families. Chainlight is the Healing Wave green wrapped around the Chain Heal gold, and Brackwater is the Riptide aqua with some depth put back into it. Neither brings in a colour from outside, so nothing in them would feel new to someone who has played a Shaman since 2005.

The fourth column wasn't in the plan. It turned up while I was building this grid, in the cell where Riptide had to sit inside the Chainlight palette and I gave it its own pale aqua with a Chainlight edge so it wouldn't be the odd one out. That one light looked more like a Shaman than anything else on the page, so I tried it on the other two spells as well.

How it could look in game

Coloured lights only go so far, so here are the three reference frames again with the spell effects retinted. The shapes, the casting poses and the scene are the same in every row, and Riptide is left exactly as it ships.

The second row is the smallest change of all, because it only puts the 2008 Chain Heal back. Healing Wave and Chain Heal already look related there, which shows how much that one patch got right, but Riptide is still standing on its own at the end of the row. The last two rows are the ones where all three finally belong together.

Healing Wave in green, Chain Heal in gold and Riptide in pale aqua, as they look today — Reference 05 / Classic, todayGame footage

Healing Wave in green, Chain Heal as a green beam with a yellow heart, and Riptide in pale aqua — Reference 06 / The Wrath version, Chain Heal as in patch 3.0.2Concept mock-up on game footage

Healing Wave and Chain Heal retinted to teal water next to an unchanged Riptide — Reference 07 / All waterConcept mock-up on game footage

Healing Wave and Chain Heal retinted to pale aqua with a bright green rim next to an unchanged Riptide — Reference 08 / Tide aqua with a Chainlight rimConcept mock-up on game footage

My pick: Tide aqua with a Chainlight rim

White core

#FFFFFF

The hottest point of the glow

Tide aqua

#BAF6EA

Body of every heal, sampled from Riptide

Chainlight

#C0FD7F

Rim and halo, sampled from the 2008 Chain Heal

Storm green

#69D05D

Falloff, trails, the last of the glow

If I have to choose, this is the one. The green edge is still a throwback to the Nature heal every classic Shaman grew up with, so nobody loses the spell they remember. With water at its heart it can no longer be mistaken for a Druid's green, and without the gold it stops borrowing from the Light, which leaves Restoration with a look that belongs to the class and to nobody else. It also solves the Frost problem from the other side, because a pale aqua with a living green rim is not something ice has ever looked like.

All water is the cleaner idea and I still like it a lot, but it cuts the last tie to Nature, and I think that tie is worth keeping. Forever is Classic plus for a reason, and this is the kind of small, careful change that makes the plus mean something.

How small the job is

For Healing Wave it means a tint on the existing glow and taking the leaves out. For Chain Heal it means a hue shift on the beam. For Riptide it means nothing at all, because the other two spells come to meet it. The animations, the timing, the particle counts and the size of every effect stay exactly as they are, so everything would still look like it belongs in the 2004 client.

Original concept

Chainlight, Brackwater and the Tide aqua pick are my own proposals, and References 06 to 08 are concept mock-ups made on game footage. The classic palette, Chainlight and Tide aqua are sampled from the reference images in this study, while the Brackwater, Druid and Frost values are picked by eye as a starting point for discussion. None of this is announced or official.

06 / The test

Cover the names. Still a Shaman?

Every Restoration effect in Forever, the three in this study and whatever gets added later, should pass that one question. I am not asking for every Shaman spell to turn blue, or for the school to change, or for the old effects to be thrown away, and Enhancement and Elemental can carry on exactly as they are. The only thing I would like Blizzard to decide is what Restoration is supposed to look like, whether that is water, spirit, a Nature of its own or a bit of each, and then let the three spells we press all night say the same thing.

Sources

Chain Heal, Warcraft Wiki (patch 3.0.2 note on the spell graphics)
Shadow hunter, Warcraft Wiki (Healing Wave as a Warcraft III ability that worked like Chain Heal)
Shadow Hunter (Warcraft III), Wowpedia (Healing Wave tooltip)
Paladin (Warcraft II), Warcraft Wiki (Healing, the only spell that heals another unit)
Death knight (Warcraft II), Warcraft Wiki (Death Coil drains life back to the caster)
Healing Wave, Warcraft Wiki (water-based animation in patch 4.0.6)
Brine, Warcraft Wiki
Call of Water (2), Warcraft Wiki (quest text, Islen Waterseer and Brine)
Call of Water (7), Warcraft Wiki (the tainted shrine in Silverpine)
Restoration Shaman guide for WoW Forever, Icy Veins
Beautiful new Restoration visuals, MMO-Champion forums (player reactions to the Retail water update)

End of the study

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A tauren priest in white and gold robes holding a crystal-headed hammer, golden light rising around him

Back to the archive

Brandcrafting / 002

An’she, the unused asset of the Tauren brand.

The Tauren pray to the sun, and the game barely says its name.

LoreRace identity

Hearthstone card art

01 / The brief

The sun has a name.

If you have ever rolled a Tauren you have watched the sun come up over Mulgore more times than you could count.

Ask most Tauren players what that sun is called, though, and you will get a blank look. It is An’she, the right eye of the Earth Mother, and I think it is the most underused piece of brand in the whole of Azeroth. You can take a Tauren from Camp Narache all the way to 60 and barely hear the name.

Compare that with the night elves. Elune is in their spells, their priestesses and the way they say hello, and in Forever she is in their racial too. The Tauren have a sun god of their own and the game keeps him in a drawer.

So I wanted to look at An’she the way I would look at a client’s brand when there is something good in it they are not using. What does the brand own already, where does it show up, where does it go quiet, and how far could you push it before a Tauren stops feeling like a Tauren? The timing matters as well. Forever is rewriting racials and handing out new race and class combinations, and the Tauren are the only Horde race it left exactly as it found them.

02 / Lore and limits

It’s all in the lore already.

Everything below is canon or confirmed for Forever. None of it is my invention; the issue is how little of it the game actually uses.

01
Canon
The Earth Mother made the land and the tauren. Her eyes are the sun and the moon: An’she is the right one, Mu’sha the left.
02
Canon
In the myth An’she is born first, a bright son, then his gentler sister Mu’sha, and the Earth Mother presses both into her eyes to keep them safe while she sleeps. In the later story Eyes of the Earth Mother he is tied to fire and fights with two blades.
03
Canon
Mu’sha is the tauren name for Elune, so the moon they pray to is the same moon the night elves already have.
04
Canon / Original game
The scrolls in Thunder Bluff tell how the Earth Mother tore out her eyes and set them chasing each other across the sky. The sun has been in the Tauren story since launch.
05
Canon / Later
Tauren priests later became the Seers, who draw on the Light of An’she and serve alongside the Sunwalkers. Their power can look like red flame pouring out of a white-hot core. So Blizzard did tie the sun to Tauren priests, a few expansions after the version of the world Forever is set in.
06
Official / Hearthstone
Priest of An’she is a tauren card from Forged in the Barrens, which is set in the same Barrens and Mulgore era as Forever.
07
Official / Forever
Every race now has two active and two passive racials. Night elves got Elune’s Light. Tauren got War Stomp, Cultivation, Plainsrunning and Endurance.
08
Official / Forever
Forever adds six new race and class combinations, Gnome Priest and Undead Paladin among them. None of them are Tauren.
09
Official / Forever
Every priest race has two priest spells of its own. Night elves get Starshards and Elune’s Grace.
10
In game / Forever beta
There is a level 55 tauren NPC called Eylah Sunhorn, with the title Sun Priest of An’she, standing in a tauren camp with a quest to give.

Eylah Sunhorn, Sun Priest of An'she, a tauren in gold and red robes with a quest marker above her — Reference 01 / Eylah Sunhorn, Sun Priest of An’sheWoW Forever beta

This is the bit that got me. The moon has a racial and two priest spells with Elune’s name on them. The sun has one priestess standing in a camp, and no Tauren player is allowed to become her.

03 / The benchmark

What Elune gets right.

Elune is the clearest example in the game of a faith turning into a brand. She has a name people actually say, a colour, a type of building, a priesthood, a greeting, and in Forever a button on your bar. Elune’s Light is 10% crit for 15 seconds on a three-minute cooldown. As a spell it is fine and nothing more, but every time a night elf presses it the game says her name again, and that repetition is the whole point.

The Tauren kit is a different story. War Stomp, Endurance, Plainsrunning and Cultivation are all true to the race: big, tough, at home on the plains, good with herbs. None of them touches what the Tauren believe in. Their whole culture rests on the Earth Mother, and her eyes are the sun and the moon. The moon is shared, since the Tauren see Mu’sha and Elune as the same light, which leaves An’she as the one piece of their faith nobody else has a claim on. It is also the piece the game hides the most.

Priests make it even more obvious. Forever gave every priest race two spells, so a night elf priest takes Starshards and Elune’s Grace into every fight. It also gave the Light to gnomes and paladins to the Forsaken, which tells me Blizzard is happy to put holy magic in odd hands when the fantasy works. Meanwhile the Tauren worship a sun that is up there every single day, and they got nothing new. I could see it for Forever.

04 / Touchpoint audit

Counting the touchpoints.

I ran both gods through the same audit I would do for a brand, one touchpoint at a time. It doesn’t go well for the sun.

Touchpoint	Elune (night elves)	An’she (Tauren)
Racial	Elune’s Light	None
Priest spells	Starshards, Elune’s Grace	One NPC, not playable
Name on a button	Twice	Only on an NPC’s title
Everyday phrase	"Elune-adore"	"Walk with the Earth Mother"
Story	Everywhere, from Darnassus to the moonwells	The Thunder Bluff scrolls

To be fair, the Tauren voice works. Everything they say points down at the Earth Mother and the land under their hooves, and I wouldn’t change that. The sky half of their faith just never gets a line. In brand terms it is a strong parent brand with a sub-brand it never got round to launching.

05 / Activations

What I would add.

I wanted the Tauren to stay recognisable, so every idea here goes into a slot Forever has already built and left empty.

The rule: An’she is the day

Elune has the night and the stars, so An’she should take the day and fire. The easiest way to make that stick is one small mechanic that keeps coming back: An’she abilities do a little extra in daylight. Use it across the whole kit and players pick it up without anyone explaining it, the same way a brand colour starts doing its job once you have seen it enough times.

An’she’s Offering, a racial for every Tauren

Cultivation is a nice idea, but all it says is that Tauren pick herbs. An’she’s Offering keeps the herbs, because the race already owns that, and turns them into an offering to the sun.

Tauren racial / replaces Cultivation / proposed

An’she’s Offering

Instant3 min cooldown

Consumes a herb gathered through Herbalism as an offering to An’she, increasing your Spirit and Armor by 10% for 1 min. During the day, also instantly restores 10% of your maximum health.

I gave it the same shape as Elune’s Light, a god’s name plus one word, so the two racials look like a pair. The gesture itself goes back a long way. In the original World of Warcraft cinematic a tauren stands on a ridge above Mulgore and lets a cloud of glowing incense go into the wind, an offering to the father sun. That shot is from 2004, and twenty-odd years later this racial would put it on every Tauren’s bar.

A tauren on a cliff above Mulgore at sunset, glowing incense drifting towards the sun — Reference 02 / The offering to the father sunWorld of Warcraft cinematic, 2004

Concept mock-up: a tauren in Mulgore raising an arm towards the sky as the offering is made — Reference 03 / How An’she’s Offering could look in gameConcept mock-up on a game screenshot

The Tauren priest

Tauren priests should be in Forever, and they should be Seers, priests of An’she, instead of borrowing somebody else’s Light. The lore wrote the job description years ago and Eylah Sunhorn already has the title. Forever gives each priest race one spell at level 10 and one at level 20, so the Tauren would fill the same two slots as the night elves.

Night elf / level 10 / in Forever

Starshards

Channeled, 30 yd range30 sec cooldown

Rains starshards down on the enemy target’s head, dealing Arcane damage over 6 sec.

Tauren / level 10 / proposed

Eye of An’she

Instant, 30 yd range30 sec cooldown

The sun turns its gaze on the target, burning it for Fire damage over 6 sec.

Night elf / level 20 / in Forever

Elune’s Grace

Instant5 min cooldown

Melee and ranged attacks are 50% less likely to hit you for 15 sec, or until 3 attacks miss.

Tauren / level 20 / proposed

Dawnmantle

Instant5 min cooldown

Wraps a friendly target in the warmth of the rising sun, increasing healing received by 20% for 15 sec. During the day, also removes one Poison or Disease effect.

Eye of An’she does the same damage as Starshards, but Fire instead of Arcane, and that one swap carries most of the idea. The lore already describes the Seers’ power as red flame coming out of white-hot light, so it isn’t a stretch. Starshards fall on you from the night sky; with An’she, the sun looks at you and you burn. No other priest does Fire damage, so it reads as Tauren straight away, and the name comes from the myth itself, since An’she is one of the Earth Mother’s eyes.

Elune’s Grace protects the night elf who casts it. Dawnmantle protects someone else, which suits a people whose whole thing is looking after the land and each other.

That’s three abilities and one rule, all for one god. I’d leave paladins out of it. The Tauren already have a faith built around the sun; it just needs to show up in the game.

Original concept

An’she’s Offering, Eye of An’she and Dawnmantle are fan proposals, not announced game content. Starshards and Elune’s Grace are shown as they work in the Forever beta.

06 / The test

Does the sun get a word in?

That’s the question I would ask of anything new for the Tauren, whether it’s a racial, a spell, a quest or a line of dialogue. Plenty of the time the answer can be no. The Earth Mother is still the heart of it and the land comes first. But these are people who pray to a god that crosses the sky every day, and Forever is a good place to let them look up once in a while.

Sources

Earth Mother, Wowpedia
An’she, Wowpedia
Elune, Wowpedia
Seers, Wowpedia
Know Your Lore: An’she and the Holy Light, Engadget
Priest of An’she, Hearthstone Wiki
All new race and class combos and racial abilities in WoW Forever, Icy Veins
Tauren race guide for WoW Forever, Icy Veins
All new racial abilities in WoW Forever, Method
WoW Forever priest changes
WoW Forever priest: Penance, racial spells and new talents, Endgame Tools
NPC database, Warcraft Forever (Eylah Sunhorn)
An’she’s Offering, first shared as Rite of An’she: @laurendorwow on X, 28 September 2026

End of the study

More worlds
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Back to Brandcrafting

01 / Before the races

The rules before the races.

I picked two races per faction, plus four more as a stretch. The Skyborne get their own section after the factions, because they're the only race on both sides: one people split between two factions that want different things, which for a co-branding exercise is about as good as it gets.

I recently did a co-branding job at work, and most of it came down to finding the common ground between the two brands, both in how they look and in their tone of voice. The Witch has the same problem: you can't put a British, Gilneas witch feel on a troll, it would just look odd. I'm also a big elf enjoyer myself and I honestly wasn't sure how that aesthetic would look outside Gilneas, so I started wondering what the Witch is going to look like when we co-brand it with the other races.

First, though, the things that don't change whoever is wearing the robe. Coven burgundy is still the class colour and Drust azure is still the colour of the magic, and the red thread comes along too, because Heartstitch can't live without it.

Coven burgundy#9E2B4EClass colour
Drust azure#55C7EEThe magic itself
Ritual red#8E303AThe thread and the ribbon

I'm also not giving any race its own accent colour. If every race brought its own palette the master brand would disappear, and you'd end up with a pile of classes that happen to share a name. What each race brings instead is its story and its materials, which I've kept as a moodboard, plus the way its witch talks. The red ribbon stays on the Fetish whatever race plants it.

02 / Alliance

Alliance.

Human.

Humans are the root, so this is the co-brand every other one gets measured against. It's the Gilnean Harvest Witch, the strange woman in the Blackwald with her tied sticks, built on the English folk magic of cunning folk and poppets hidden in walls. The Witch was born here and nothing needs translating, so I'd keep the Human version as plain as possible.

The lore even explains how the name stuck. The old ways of Gilneas had nearly died out when a famine hit, and it was their keepers who called on the earth's blessing and brought the harvest back, which is how they became harvest-witches. Later, when Gilneans heard second-hand stories about night elf druids, they started calling their own witches druids too, even though hardly anyone knew what a druid was. Celestine, the harvest-witch everyone calls a druid, is the best example.

Moodboard

wicker
raw wool
wrought iron
dark Gilnean stone

Voice

She talks like a farmer's wife, about the weather and who still owes her a favour, and she calls what she does the old ways.

Night Elf.

For the night elves I'd go straight to the goddess at the top of the whole witch tradition. Hecate was the Greek goddess of magic and witchcraft, and also a moon goddess and the goddess of ghosts and necromancy. She's usually drawn with a torch in each hand, the torches that lit Demeter's way through the night when she went looking for Persephone, and Medea, the most famous witch in Greek myth, was her priestess. Hecate holds the moon and the dead in one figure, and that's the pairing I want for the night elves.

Then there's Elune. In Classic a night elf who dies turns into a wisp, so her people already don't leave quietly. The Night Fae campaign pushed this much further: when Elune's power flares through Tyrande in Ardenweald, the Winter Queen, ruler of a forest of the dead, calls her sister and accuses her of ignoring their cries for help. Elune admits she has condemned her favoured children, the Winter Queen answers that together they can still guide their souls to their spring, then the scene cuts to black and the story never comes back to it.

A night elf Witch would live in that gap. The priestesses see Elune as the light that guides them, and the witches believe she also decides what happens to the dead and will share that power with anyone brave enough to ask. Night elves still can't be Mages in Forever because the arcane nearly wiped them out, so a night elf who goes looking for this kind of power is already doing something her people would frown on.

Moodboard

living wood
owl feathers
moon-silver
moonwell stone

Voice

She speaks quietly and formally, like a Sister of Elune, and you only notice the difference when she starts asking the goddess about the dead.

03 / Horde

Horde.

Undead.

The Forsaken keep the European look, because they were Lordaeron before they were anything else, so the Witch they inherit is the Human one, just after the funeral. Their object is the Hand of Glory: the dried hand of a hanged man, holding a candle that kept everyone in the house frozen while a thief went about his business. The only one said to survive sits in Whitby Museum, and a Necromancy Witch could take it almost as it is and turn it into a crowd control spell.

And the Forsaken already have a witch figure, they just call her something else. In Irish folklore the bean sí, the fairy woman, wailed to warn a family that someone was about to die, and she grew out of the keening women who sang the dead out at real Irish funerals. Warcraft's banshees are the spirits of elf women who scream and take over the bodies of the living, and the Forsaken were ruled for years by the Banshee Queen herself, so a Forsaken Witch would keen over the dead, the way the bean sí did.

One rule here: no plague green. It belongs to the Apothecaries and the Warlocks, and it would fight the Drust azure every time they share a screen.

Moodboard

tallow
shroud linen
gallows wood

Voice

She has the Forsaken's dry gallows humour, but the accent is still a Lordaeron villager's.

Troll.

This is the one I had to think about the most, and the answer turned out simpler than I expected. My first instinct was Hoodoo and Vodou, and that's the wrong well to draw from. Hoodoo is an African American spiritual practice and Haitian Vodou is a living religion, neither has anything to do with trolls, and what Warcraft calls voodoo is mostly the Hollywood version.

The funny part is where that Hollywood version comes from. The doll full of pins is really the European poppet, the same thing an English witch would hide in a wall, and it was books and films around 1930 that stuck it on the Caribbean, where it never belonged to Vodou in the first place. Even the words witch doctor are English, first written down in 1718 for someone who protected you from witches.

So the troll Witch and the Gilnean Witch share a root, and the Horde has had its witch for a long time in the witch doctor, from Zum'rah raising the dead in Zul'Farrak to Zalazane hexing his own people on the Echo Isles. I don't need much more than that, as long as I stick to the words Warcraft already gives the trolls and keep real religions out of it.

Dig a bit further into Classic and the troll Witch has a darker cousin too. The Atal'ai were the priests of Hakkar the Soulflayer, the loa of blood, who demanded souls in sacrifice every day until the other Gurubashi tribes rose up and drove his priests out into the Swamp of Sorrows. When they finally brought him back in Zul'Gurub, the priest leading them was Jin'do the Hexxer, which I'll admit is a pretty good title for a troll witch.

Moodboard

bone
tusk
carved masks
jungle fibre
Zul'Gurub stone

Voice

She sounds the way trolls already sound in the game, loud and playful, and she saves the menace for when she hexes someone. Her words come from Warcraft only, things like loa, mojo and fetish.

04 / Both factions

Skyborne, on both sides.

Both Skyborne factions come out of the same story, which is why the Witch works the same way for both of them. Thousands of years ago a group of Highborne exiles made a pact with the wind spirits and built their home in Skywall. Now the spirits have vanished and the two factions disagree on what to do about it: the High Order, descendants of the scholars of Eldre'Thalas, want to reclaim the arcane so their people can stop depending on anyone, while the Windshapers, the first to receive the spirits' gift, want them back at any cost.

I couldn't have made up what comes next. In the year 815 a bishop in Lyon wrote an angry treatise against people who believed in Magonia, a land in the clouds whose sailors crossed the sky in ships and worked with tempestarii, weather witches who raised storms on command. And around 1350 a chronicler wrote that the women of the Isle of Man sold wind to sailors, tied up in three knots of thread, to be undone whenever the ship needed it.

For me that's the Skyborne Witch: someone who ties the wind into knots herself while everyone else waits for the spirits to come back. A High Order witch would do it so her people stop needing the spirits at all, and a Windshaper would treat every knot as a small bargain with spirits that aren't there anymore. Skyborne can't be Warlocks or Priests in Forever, so the Witch would be their only shadow caster on both sides.

Moodboard

silk, brass and parchment (High Order)
feathers, gold, Zephyr and Wayfinder tattoos (Windshapers)

Voice

A High Order witch talks about the wind like a contract she's read twice, while a Windshaper talks about it like a favour she's still waiting on.

05 / Stretch

The stretch.

Everything above is the safe list, the races where the Witch slots in without forcing anything. Push the fantasy far enough, though, and every race in Forever has a witch hiding somewhere in its lore or its folklore. These four take more convincing, and they were the most fun to write.

Dwarf.

Dwarves can't be Warlocks in Forever, so the darkest thing a dwarf could learn has no class to live in yet. And the lore already has a dwarf witch who just never got the title. Modgud was the sorceress queen of the Dark Iron clan, wife of Sorcerer-Thane Thaurissan, and in the War of the Three Hammers she led the attack on the Wildhammer capital, Grim Batol.

She cut her palm with an enchanted dagger, let her blood run onto the stones, and the shadows of the fortress came alive. Khardros Wildhammer killed her, but her dying curse left Grim Batol so tainted that the Wildhammers abandoned it for Aerie Peak, and the Dark Irons hiding in its depths turned into the skardyn. The blade she carried was Xal'atath, which later remembers how easy her hatred made her to sway.

A blood ritual on stone is Blood Sacrifice with a backstory, and I'd pair it with the Norse side of the dwarves: the völva, the seeress whose name means staff-bearer and whose staff stood for spinning the thread of life. A dwarf Witch would be a Bronzebeard who picked up what the Dark Irons left behind.

Moodboard

iron
slate
carved runes

Voice

She's gruff and blunt and swears every other line, and she gets defensive the moment you ask where she learned all this.

Tauren.

Tauren can't be Warlocks in Forever either, and they already have the perfect witch, with the title to prove it. Magatha Grimtotem is the Elder Crone, matriarch of the one tauren tribe that never formally joined the Horde, a powerful shaman who has wanted power for most of her life. In the Classic era she still lives in Thunder Bluff, in the hut between the two bridges on Elder Rise.

Here's my what if: what if Magatha's shamanism was never shamanism at all? A Shaman asks the elements for help and keeps the balance. Magatha bends the spirits to her will and takes from life whenever it suits her, and for me that's where a Shaman ends and a Witch begins. It would explain why the Grimtotem always stood apart and everything she does to Cairne later, and it makes her the obvious trainer, so every Tauren Witch would learn the craft from her, in a hut in the middle of Thunder Bluff.

Moodboard

smoke-dark hide
horn
kodo bone
broken totems

Voice

She's slow and solemn like any tauren elder, but she has Magatha's coldness and talks about the Earth Mother as if the land owes her something.

Orc.

Orcs are a stretch for the opposite reason: they already have Warlocks, so a Witch has to earn her place by being something else, and the answer is older than World of Warcraft itself. In the very first Warcraft the orc Necrolytes, trained at the temple, already cast Raise Dead, and the manual says their altars were built from a special wood called Blackroot and that the blood offering had only recently been swapped for gold. When the death knights were made, Raise Dead passed to them as the last thing the Necrolytes left behind.

Blizzard has even made an orc witch once: Hagatha, the villain of Hearthstone's Witchwood, an orc shaman who twisted the Blackwald into the Witchwood. An orc Witch would be the Necrolyte from before the demons got involved.

Moodboard

Blackroot wood
black iron
bone
war paint

Voice

She talks short and hard, and she still uses the old temple words for offerings and Blackroot that the rest of the Horde would rather forget.

Gnome.

Gnomes can be Warlocks too, so on paper this one is a stretch, but it's an easy one, because the word gnome itself comes from an alchemist. Paracelsus used it in a book published in 1566 for his earth spirits, and the homunculus, a little artificial person grown in a flask, is one of his ideas too.

So the gnome Witch is an alchemist, the same class with the same specs, working at a bench instead of a cauldron.

Moodboard

copper wire
brass bolts
glass
cork

Voice

She's cheerful and technical, she calls her spells experiments and her ill-wishes side effects, and she never once uses the word witch.

06 / The Fetish

One Fetish, or nine.

Every co-brand needs one asset that never moves, the thing that tells you whose product it is whatever the partner brings to it. For the Witch that's the Fetish. In game it works like a Shaman's totem: she plants it in the ground and it does its work from there, only that work is hurting whoever stands near it.

The simplest route is to keep it identical on every race: twigs bound by hand into the rough figure of a witch, a red hood, a bird skull for a face, the red ribbon wound round the stake and the wrists, and a little cairn of stones holding it upright. It's rural and a bit archaic, and the red ribbon is the first thing you'd recognise, the way you'd recognise a logo.

Or the Fetish could change with the race, the way the Shaman's totems do. Since The Burning Crusade a draenei's totems haven't looked like an orc's, later races got their own set too, and nobody has ever doubted they belong to the same class. The Witch could work the same way: a local edition of the Fetish for every race, built from that race's moodboard, that keeps the bound twigs, the skull and the red ribbon so the master brand still shows.

Here are four of them, and even side by side they still look like totems from the same class.

Witch standard / Human
A bound stake with a bird skull and a torn red cape.
Undead
A Hand of Glory on a twig stake, a candle burning on every finger.
Skyborne
A twig spire with a caged azure crystal, feathers and ribbons in the wind.
Night Elf
A crescent moon of bound twigs with a bird skull and owl feathers.

I haven't made up my mind between the two yet. One Fetish for everyone keeps the brand tighter, while nine of them would give every race something of its own to plant, so I'd really like to know which one you'd go for.

07 / Closing

The line-up test.

Line up nine Witches, one per race, each with her Fetish at her feet. The twigs and the red ribbon should tell you straight away that they're the same class, and everything else, her materials and the way she talks, should tell you who she is and where she comes from. If you can read both from across a busy auction house, the co-brand works.

Sources

The Witch is a fan concept, not a confirmed class. Race lore and class availability are from Blizzard's Forever announcements; the folklore is from the pages below. For the witch doctor, the poppet and the Vodou and Hoodoo notes, see the sources of the Witch study. Zum'rah and Zalazane are from the game itself. The homepage thumbnail includes troll witch doctor fan art by tadashiroi.

Skyborne lore and racialsBlizzard, Meet the New Skyborne
Forever race and class combinationsIcy Veins
HecateTheoi, Hekate
HecateNew World Encyclopedia
Elune and the Winter QueenWarcraft Wiki, The Power of Elune
Harvest-witchesWarcraft Wiki, Harvest-witch
BansheesWarcraft Wiki, Banshee
The banshee in Irish folkloreLet's Learn Irish
Hakkar, the Atal'ai and Jin'doWarcraft Wiki, Hakkar the Soulflayer
The Gurubashi civil warWarcraft Wiki, Wrath of Soulflayer
Agobard of Lyon and MagoniaWikipedia, Magonia
TempestariiWikipedia, Tempestarii
Selling the wind in knotsMuseum of Witchcraft and Magic
Hand of GloryWhitby Museum
Modgud and Grim BatolWarcraft Wiki, Modgud Thaurissan
The völva and her staffSwedish History Museum, the Klinta staff
Magatha GrimtotemWarcraft Wiki, Magatha Grimtotem
Necrolytes and the Blackroot altarsWarcraft Wiki, Temple (WC1 Orc)
HagathaWarcraft Wiki, Hagatha the Witch
Paracelsus and the gnomeWikipedia, Gnome

End of the study

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Brandcrafting / 005

Witch: Brand Colour Palette

What colour is a Witch's magic? The game has been answering that for years, it just never put the answer in one place.

New classArt directionSpeculation

Visual reference

01 The question

In Warcraft you know the class from the colour long before you read a name. A purple bolt means Warlock and a gold flash means Paladin, and nobody needs a tooltip for that. If the Witch ever makes it into Forever, the first thing she needs is a look you recognise the moment she casts, and the spell list can wait.

The easy move would be to invent a new colour for her, and she doesn't need one. Everything she needs is already in the game, spread across Drustvar, Nazmir, the Deadmines and the Emerald Dream, waiting for someone to pick it up and put it in one place.

02 What the game already tells us

Start with the Drust, because the Witch's magic is theirs. The Heartsbane Coven learned it from Gorak Tul, and when Blizzard turned Drust magic into actual spells they filed it under three schools, Shadow, Nature and Decay. That's Blizzard's own classification. Forever has the first two, so the Witch casts Shadow and Nature, and that part doesn't need arguing.

The Drust pulled their death magic out of Thros, a corner of the Emerald Dream right where Void and Death meet, and Blizzard has since called Thros an offshoot of the Emerald Nightmare. Follow the Witch's power back far enough and you end up in the Nightmare.

And then there's blood. Warcraft lore describes blood magic as life magic that's been tortured, and one of Blizzard's own writers put it in four words: blood was tortured life. So when the Witch heals with blood she's still casting Nature, just from the darker end of it.

I love this part, because it puts the Witch right between Life and Death. Ulfar, the last Drust druid, says their magic only turns rotten when the balance tips too far towards death, and the wiki files the old harvest-witches under Life and the Heartsbane Coven under Death. My Witch would be on both lists.

03 Same school, different colour

I touched on this in the Shaman piece. Lightning Bolt and Wrath are both Nature damage and nobody has ever mixed them up, because one is blue and white and the other is green. Blizzard colours a spell by who's casting it.

Lightning BoltNature, Shaman

WrathNature, Druid

So the Witch can cast Shadow without a drop of purple and Nature without a single leaf. Her Shadow is Drust azure since her death magic comes from Thros, and her Nature is red because the life she works with is blood. The school decides what resists the spell, and the colour tells you who cast it.

Shadow Purple Drust azure

Nature Green Ritual red

Colour is only half of it, though. Shadow Bolt and Witchbolt come from the same school and only one of them sounds like a Witch, but names are a story for the next piece.

04 One palette for the class

The class palette has five colours, all taken from Drustvar. Three of them are what she wears every day: Blackwald ink for the nights, Coven burgundy for the Witch herself and Weathered bone for everything she carves and stitches. The other two only come out when she casts, Ritual red for life and Drust azure for death.

Coven burgundy is the class colour, the one on her name in a raid frame, and it's a callout to the Death Knight in Retail. It's darker and cooler than the Death Knight's crimson, closer to wine, so a Retail player gets the reference without ever mixing up the two classes. It's also a shade lighter than Ritual red, which keeps her name readable on a dark frame and leaves the deeper red for her spells.

Blackwald ink#171B24
Coven burgundy#9E2B4E
Weathered bone#C5B79C
Ritual red#8E303A
Drust azure#55C7EE

05 Effigy and Necromancy, in azure

Effigy and Necromancy share one palette, built on the colour Warcraft already gives to death. The lore describes Nature in bright yellows and greens and Death in pale blues and greys, and the Drust lean right into it: their fetishes give off an eerie blue light once a soul is trapped inside, and anyone they enslave gets a blue glow in the eyes. Look at the hexed pig in Drustvar, with its one azure eye, and you know straight away who did it.

You don't even need the lore for this, because the game shows you every time you die. Release your spirit and the world drains to black and white under a cold azure wash, and the ghosts around the graveyard drift in the same pale blue mist. Even spirits that aren't dead wear it, like the Shaman's Ghost Wolf, a wolf made of the same blue light. Azure already means the other side in this game, so giving it to the Witch takes no explaining.

The second colour in this palette is Necrotic teal. Maldraxxus is where necromantic magic was born, and its deathwalkers burn in a cold blue green that sits right next to the Drust azure, so I'd keep the two together. Effigy, with its wicker and fetishes, leans towards the azure, Necromancy leans towards the teal of graves and the risen dead, and the two still read as one family.

Thros night#131D27
Grave slate#375462
Necrotic teal#11BD8C
Drust azure#55C7EE
Bone#D9CCB6

06 Heartstitch, in Ritual red

Heartstitch is the spec that bleeds, and here I don't want to be clever at all, because blood magic in Warcraft is red everywhere you look: the blood trolls of Nazmir, the San'layn, the old Gurubashi, the Dokani mogu with their blood golems. It isn't only trolls and vampires either. Walk into the Deadmines after Cataclysm and you'll find Defias Blood Wizards, Westfall bandits bleeding for power in a mine under Moonbrook. They aren't in Forever, but they show something useful, which is that ordinary humans in Azeroth learn this stuff too.

In Retail that red has an owner, the Death Knight, whose whole Blood spec is built on it. Forever has no Death Knight, so the colour is sitting there unclaimed, and the Witch can pick it up as long as she dyes it in her own Ritual red, the same way her burgundy class colour points at the Death Knight without copying it.

What makes it hers is where the blood goes. A blood troll bleeds into totems and runes, and the Witch bleeds into thread and cloth and her cauldron.

Thorn black#171011
Dried blood#3A130D
Ritual red#8E303A
Blood glow#CF0A09
Weathered bone#C5B79C

07 The family

Put the Witch next to everything she's related to and the colours line up by themselves. The Emerald Nightmare has been black and red since Legion, all thorns and fleshy growths, and Thros is its offshoot. Add the red of the blood mages, the teal of the necromancers and the azure of the Drust, and to me that's one family of magic. The Witch would be the first class to wear all of it.

So if she ever summons thorns, I'd make them black with red sap, like the Nightmare's, because she comes from that family and it should show.

08 What she leaves alone

The Witch shares her schools with other classes. Her Shadow sits next to the Shadow Priest and the Warlock, and her Nature next to the Druid, so I put the palettes side by side to see what she should stay away from.

Shadow first, sampled straight from the Classic spell icons. The Priest lives in indigo and the Warlock in purple, so both colours stay off the Witch's palette completely and her Shadow is slate and azure instead. The Drust azure does show up in the Priest's Mind Flay and Psychic Scream, but only as an accent and never as the main colour of a spell, so I'm happy to give it to her. Necrotic teal is the closest she gets to the Warlock's fel green, which is why it has to stay blue green and never drift towards yellow.

Nature is even simpler. Green is the Druid's whole kit, from blossom to deep wood, and there's no green anywhere in the Witch's. The gesture is different too: a Druid heal grows and opens up with leaves and petals, and a Witch heal closes a wound with thread, cloth and blood.

09 The test

Cover the names and try it. If you see a bundle of twigs trailing azure and teal smoke, or a red ribbon of light wrapping round someone and closing their wounds, you should know it's a Witch without being told, and the same goes for a cauldron bubbling over with teal or red fumes.

Forever is Classic plus, and this is the kind of plus I'd like to see from it: every colour in this piece was already somewhere in the game, and the Witch gathers them in one place.

Sources and notes

Warcraft Wiki, Drust magic: schools (shadow, nature, decay), the blue light of fetishes, the blue glow of the enslaved, Ulfar on balance, Thros.
Warcraft Wiki, Blood magic: "tortured life magic", practitioners, the Revendreth note. Muffinus on Twitter, 2015: "Blood was tortured life."
Warcraft Wiki, Nature magic: Life in yellows and greens, Death in pale blues and greys.
Warcraft Wiki, Necromantic: Maldraxxus as the birthplace of necromantic magic.
Warcraft Wiki, Emerald Nightmare and Nightmare dragonflight: appearance, black and red since Legion, Thros as an offshoot (BlizzCon 2018 interview).
Warcraft Wiki, Deadmines: Defias Blood Wizards in the Cataclysm version.
Death Knights: written for Forever as it stands today, with no Death Knight class.
Palette samples: Shadow Priest and Warlock from their Classic spell icons (Wowhead). Druid palette from Brandcrafting 01 (by eye). Witch colours from the moodboards.
Images: World of Warcraft (Blizzard Entertainment), via Warcraft Wiki and Wowhead.

End of the study

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About

Same world.
Older eyes.

01 / Who is writing

I’m Mattia. I have been playing World of Warcraft since 2006, and for a good part of my teenage years I raided hard, the kind of hard where the raid schedule decided what the rest of the week looked like.

I’m not that player any more and I won’t be again, which I say with some relief and a fair amount of nostalgia. WoW Forever is what brought me back, and what I didn’t expect was that after years of working as an art director I would walk through the same zones and see something else in them: a brand. Azeroth has a visual identity, a tone of voice, rules it follows and rules it happily breaks, and once you start noticing them it is very hard to stop.

02 / What this is

Azeroth Brandbook is where I write those things down. Every Brandcrafting study takes one piece of the world, a class, a race, a set of spells, and looks at it the way I would look at a brand at work: what it promises, where it shows up, where it goes quiet and what I would do about it. Some studies stay close to the lore and others are open speculation, and I try to make it clear which is which.

None of this is official, and none of it is a claim about what the game should be. It is one art director’s personal reading of a world he first logged into twenty years ago, and you are welcome to disagree with all of it.

03 / A note on the words and images

I’m Italian, and English isn’t my first language. The studies are mine from start to finish: the ideas, the research, the lore digging and the opinions. Once a study is done I use AI to help me translate it all into English that everyone can follow, so the thinking is mine and the polish gets a hand.

The same goes for some of the pictures. Alongside real game screenshots and icons, some of the images on this site are generated with AI or edited in Photoshop. I do this for fun, with no time or budget to commission the artists this world deserves, so please take the pictures as visual references and keep your attention on the ideas.

Azeroth Brandbook is an unofficial fan project and is not affiliated with Blizzard Entertainment. Warcraft and all related names and imagery belong to their respective owners.

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Downloads / Addon 01

OnlySums, the Summoners’ Ledger.

Your VIP pass to soul-powered travel.

A free addon for WoW Forever that puts travellers who need a summon in touch with the warlocks who sell them, and keeps the whole thing in character.

AddonWarlockRoleplay

Download OnlySums 1.0 ZIP · 28 KB · WoW Forever

The OnlySums welcome window in game: the Summoners’ Ledger, with the line “Your VIP Pass to Soul-Powered Travel” above a red Join OnlySums button — In-game screenshot, OnlySums 1.0

TypeAddon for WoW Forever

Version1.0, released 9 Oct 2026

Made byMattia

PriceFree (the summons aren’t)

01 / Why it exists

Forever took the
summoning stones away.

In Forever there are no summoning stones and no group finder that drops you at the dungeon door, so if you don’t feel like walking to Blackrock Mountain, you need a warlock.

The Ritual of Summoning is the only way left to pull someone across the map, and it isn’t free to run. The warlock needs two more people at the portal to click it, and every summon eats a Soul Shard that cost a kill to collect. So warlocks sell it, the way they did back in Vanilla, and right now the whole trade happens in Trade chat.

I play a warlock in Forever, and I wanted that trade to have a proper home: one place where a traveller can see who’s open for business near where they’re going, and where a warlock can name a price once and get on with their evening.

The name came first

I’ll be honest, I had the name before I had the addon. OnlySums made me laugh, and once it existed the pitch more or less wrote itself, so the welcome screen sells you a VIP pass to soul-powered travel, 100% Nether Access and a summoning creator near you.

I’m RP-biased though, and a joke that runs through the whole window would get old by the third summon. So the moment you press Join, the addon stops winking and talks like Azeroth: you choose where you’re bound, conjurers open a circle, travellers seek passage and you scry again when the list looks thin. As an art director I’d call it two layers of the same brand, a loud campaign name to get people through the door and a product voice that fits the world once they’re inside.

02 / How it works

Inside
the Ledger.

The window has two tabs, one for people who need a summon and one for the warlocks who sell them, and each side shows up in the other’s list.

If you need a summon

Type /sums or click the round button on the minimap, then pick where you’re bound from the list of dungeons, raids and cities. Set how many of you are travelling and, if you want, what you’ll pay. Warlocks with an open circle are listed nearest to your destination first, with their price and whether they bring their own helpers. Pick one, press Whisper, and the addon sends a short whisper for you:

To [Morvaine]: Well met, Morvaine. Three of us seek passage to Blackrock Mountain. Your price is 5g a head and the coin is ready.

If nobody’s around, press Seek a summon. Your call then shows up in every warlock’s window with your destination, how many you are and what you’re offering, and they can whisper you instead.

If you sell summons

On the My circle tab the addon reads where you’re standing from your map. You set a price in gold and silver, a head or a group, and you choose whether you bring your own two helpers (that’s VIP+, and it’s worth charging more for) or the travellers bring two of theirs. It counts your Soul Shards too, and when the last one goes your circle closes by itself, so nobody whispers you for a summon you can’t do. Press Open my circle and you’re in every traveller’s Ledger, with the people looking for a summon listed underneath, those heading for your zone first.

The Ledger tab: Where to set to Undercity, two travellers paying 10 gold, and an empty list of conjurers with an open circle — The Ledger, for travellers

The My circle tab: a price of 5 gold a head, VIP+ helpers, 14 Soul Shards, and three travellers seeking a summon — My circle, for warlocks

The channel

Joining also puts you in a normal chat channel called OnlySums, and it’s the part I like most because it works without the addon. Anyone can type /join OnlySums and read the calls. When a warlock opens a circle with the call-out ticked, the channel gets one line with where they are and what they charge, and a gold [Whisper] tag at the end opens a whisper already written. Hover the minimap button and it tells you how many circles are open and how many people are waiting.

The OnlySums minimap button tooltip: 0 conjurers with an open circle, 1 traveller seeking a summon, You seek passage to Undercity — The minimap button

03 / What it won’t do

House
rules.

Nothing goes out without your click.

Every whisper and every call in the channel comes from a button you pressed, and so do the hidden messages that fill other people’s Ledgers. A call in the channel can only go out once every two minutes, so the channel doesn’t turn into Trade chat.

OnlySums keeps the Ledger, never the coin. Gold still changes hands the old way, in a trade window between the two of you, and the addon doesn’t touch it. It doesn’t talk to anything outside the game either, and the only things it saves are your own settings, like your last price and where you left the window.

You’ll only see people on your own faction who also run the addon, so the Ledger will be quiet at first. If you like it, tell your guild, or tell the warlock who just summoned you.

04 / Install

Getting it
into the game.

Download the zip and unzip it. You get a folder called OnlySums.
Move that folder into your Forever AddOns folder.Mac/Applications/World of Warcraft/_classic_beta_/Interface/AddOns/WindowsC:\Program Files (x86)\World of Warcraft\_classic_beta_\Interface\AddOns\You should end up with AddOns/OnlySums/OnlySums.toc.
Start the game. On the character screen click AddOns and check that OnlySums is ticked.
Log in and type /sums. Press Join OnlySums, and small yellow help bubbles walk you through the window the first time.

Commands

/sums: Opens or closes the window
/sums circle: Opens the My circle tab
/sums call: Posts your call-out in the channel, once every two minutes
/onlysums hello: Says “hello” in the OnlySums channel
/sums options: Opens the settings page
/sums tutorial: Shows the help bubbles again
/sums reset: Puts the window and minimap button back where they started

Download

OnlySums 1.0

OnlySums-1.0.zip · 28 KB · WoW Forever

Download

It’s version 1.0, so if something breaks, or a warlock charges you 50g for Ragefire Chasm, tell me on X.

Free, unofficial fan addon made for WoW Forever. Not affiliated with Blizzard Entertainment.

End of the article

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traveller.

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Same world.Newperspective.

Witch palette.

The studies.

Witch: Brand Colour Palette

Witch, one brand localised for every race

Witch, a heritage brand waiting for its launch

An’she, the unused asset of the Tauren brand

Shaman has an art direction problem

Witch: Tone and Voice

Tinker, a class built by hand

Less takingit for granted.More looking.

Witch, a heritage brand waiting for its launch.

What if Gilneaswent further?

The idea in one line

Nine thingsthat got me here.

The Old Ways.

Gilneas has already used a monster as a weapon.

The same people, across the sea.

Hearthstone has already been to the Witchwood.

Blizzard already ships a playable Witch.

The survey.

Two more pitches in the same survey.

Gilneas is sitting in the Forever client.

Three books and three spells.

The line between them

What the Old Ways kept quiet

The Witchwood and Drustvar

What they told the children

And Celestine?

What Forever allows

The classand its three specs.

Witch

Where it sits in the range

Three specialisations, nine spells

Effigy

Necromancy

Heartstitch

Witch... for the Horde!

How it should talk

How the Witchshould look.

The mark

Where the colours come from

Materials before effects

How it moves

The test

More worldswithin the world.

Shaman has an art direction problem.

Cover the names and guess the class.

Azeroth already has a colour code.

Palette one: the classic, as it ships today

"But a Shaman uses all the elements"

School is the category, class is the brand

If the answer is Nature, make it ours.

Palette two: Chainlight

Keeping it away from the Druid

If the answer is water, keep it away from Frost.

Frost is water with everything taken out

Palette three: Brackwater

Keeping it away from the Mage

Three spells, one pair of hands.

How it could look in game

My pick: Tide aqua with a Chainlight rim

How small the job is

More worldswithin the world.

An’she, the unused asset of the Tauren brand.

The sun has a name.

It’s all in the lore already.

What Elune gets right.

Counting the touchpoints.

What I would add.

The rule: An’she is the day

An’she’s Offering, a racial for every Tauren

The Tauren priest

More worldswithin the world.

Witch, one brand localised for every race.

The rules before the races.

Alliance.

Human.

Night Elf.

Horde.

Same world.
New
perspective.

Less taking
it for granted.
More looking.

What if Gilneas
went further?

Nine things
that got me here.

The class
and its three specs.

How the Witch
should look.

More worlds
within the world.

More worlds
within the world.

More worlds
within the world.

More worlds
within the world.

More worlds
within the world.

Same world.
Older eyes.

Addons
for Forever.

Forever took the
summoning stones away.

Inside
the Ledger.

House
rules.

Getting it
into the game.

Safe roads,
traveller.