This past month, the Project Epoch team has been hard at work on a variety of essential behind-the-scenes tasks. While the process of capturing gameplay footage and assembling assets for our upcoming Launch Trailer and launch window media is now well underway—with editing currently in the hands of a talented external collaborator—our focus has largely remained on polishing the core experience. We’ve resolved a substantial number of bugs, made targeted class balance adjustments, and continued building out the internal admin tools that support our team behind the curtain. On top of that, development of Website 2.0 has continued steadily, bringing us closer to a modernized home for all things Epoch.

As Buggy As Silithus

When we last gave an update we stated we had 1,571 issues still open across a broad spectrum of the game with no development started on them. This included 23 Launch Blocking issues. This now stands at 1,417 open of which 28 are Launch Blocking. Those who are capable of doing math (sorry Paladin players) will work that out to be 154 bugs closed and 5 new launch blocking ones added.

Our volunteer QA team has taken large strides this month to ensure that there are no more remaining “Unconfirmed” bugs reported. Everything now has a category, priority and has been verified. This involved going through sincerely hundreds of remaining reports and we wanted to express a heartfelt thank you for that effort. The result of this was the extra 5 or so launch blocking bugs that were upgraded.

Considering this is alongside all of the various background tasks we have ongoing we are pleased with this result. With things winding down on those tasks the next month for Kaytotes and Eredun will be almost exclusively focused on launch blocking bugs.

Website 2.0 Mobile

With nearly all content finalized by the end of April, we brought Magic back on a commission basis to help us push the new website across the finish line—this time with a strong focus on responsive design. With over 41% of our visitors accessing the site from mobile or tablet devices, it’s crucial that the experience feels smooth and seamless across all platforms, not just desktop.

This marks the final development phase before the launch of what we intend to be Project Epoch’s long-term web presence, and we want to thank the community for their patience as we—admittedly obsessively—fine-tune every corner of the site.

The updated site has already gone through an initial review and will continue to see final tweaks into early May. Stay tuned—its debut is just around the corner.

Kes’ Korner

Kes has spent April deep in the trenches of game polish, tackling an enormous swath of cleanup, refinement, and worldbuilding tasks to help ensure Project Epoch launches in the best shape possible. From world edits and item audits to narrative tightening and spooky new surprises, the scope of this month’s work reflects just how much care goes into even the smallest corners of the world. Here’s a breakdown of what’s been done:

• A sweeping review of item and NPC text

Hundreds of custom items, quests, and NPCs were combed through line by line to fix spelling, grammar, and clarity issues, as well as update older content to better reflect current design goals. In the process, Kes also authored a comprehensive internal style guide to serve as a reference for all written content going forward—helping us maintain consistency as new writers contribute to future patches and expansions of the lore.

• Goblin smile upgrade

All custom goblin BLPs—our custom skin files—were updated to finally include teeth, correcting a long-standing visual oddity. Goblins can now grin, sneer, and smirk with full dental fidelity.

• A full audit of all custom items introduced through quests, rare spawns, and reputation vendors

This involved updating stats, reviewing balance, and ensuring adherence to our updated itemization philosophy. Some low-level items that previously granted disproportionately strong bonuses were toned down to preserve the satisfying power curve of early leveling—after all, getting your first pair of shoulders should feel meaningful. Conversely, certain underwhelming items at mid and endgame were re-tuned and buffed where appropriate to better match their rarity and acquisition method.

• Expertise stat overhaul

Every item in the game featuring the Expertise stat was revisited and adjusted to align with Epoch’s new stat weight. In most cases, this halved the existing values, and in some instances, required careful redistribution of stats to keep the items balanced and relevant.

• Over 50 quest bugs resolved

These fixes range from small typos and broken objectives to more complex logic errors in branching quest paths. Many of these were reported during our most recent beta test, and their resolution helps close out a significant chunk of polish work for our leveling and exploration content.

• A new gnomish graveyard in Brewnall Village

Players venturing into Gnomeregan will be pleased to find a much more convenient and thematically appropriate respawn location. No more hiking halfway across Dun Morogh to return to the dungeon—this tiny quality-of-life change makes a big difference.

• New vendor items added to several major factions

The Argent Dawn, Thorium Brotherhood, and Ravenholdt now offer additional items to bolster their thematic identity and reward long-term investment. Expect both useful flavor and a few surprises.

• Reintegration of the Burning Crusade-era Ashenvale quests for Demon Fall Canyon

These classic questlines have been reworked and made available through Splintertree Post and Forest Song, expanding the mid-level content in this contested zone and breathing new life into a location that was little used in Vanilla.

• Internal organization overhaul

Our team Discord saw some love too, as outdated content submission forums were archived and restructured into clear, persistent threads for every upcoming patch, major story arc, and feature expansion. This cleanup improves visibility and planning as we move into final preparations and post-launch roadmapping.

• Moonglade makeover

While capturing trailer footage, we realized Moonglade had been left largely untouched in terms of custom content. Kes quickly remedied that with several additions: Malfurion Stormrage now appears in his barrow den, surrounded by a retinue of Sentinels, Watchers, and spectral companions from night elf history. A few of these figures may even have work for you—if you’re brave enough to confront the echoes of the past.

Class Adjustments

We’d like to share some minor class adjustments that have happened over the past month, not including things that are currently a work in progress. Please note that values are, as always, subject to change. These adjustments do not include bug fixes.

Mage

• The talent Improved Blink has been removed and its effect has been added onto Prismatic Cloak.
• New talent: Improved Arcane Intellect. Located on row 5, this talent causes Arcane Intellect and Arcane Brilliance to increase the target’s maximum mana by 4% per rank. 2 ranks. Developer’s note: Arcane Mage is slightly behind on damage considering its position as a mana hungry beast that requires help from other classes, but I believe this will solve itself over time, temporary buffs risk requiring nerfs later, which hurts arcane in lower gear levels. In addition, a common problem shared by every mana user is the fact that mana pools were much larger in TBC while spells did not become significantly more expensive. Due to these factors, this talent was added to give Arcane much more value in the early game, as this talent will become less useful as Arcane’s damage picks up, due to players having larger mana pools naturally over time.
• Pyroclastic Burst now stacks up to 5 times, down from 6, and it now also increases your chance to Crit with pyroblast by 3% per stack, and reduces its cast time by 0.2 seconds per stack.
• Pyroblastic Burst now also prevents you from casting Presence of Mind. Developer’s note: Pyroclastic Burst was barely a DPS gain at full stacks, so these adjustments should help increase its potency and reliability. However, Presence of Mind has PvP concerns regarding Pyroclastic Burst, therefor you can no longer cast Presence of Mind while any Pyroclastic Burst stacks are on your character.

Druid

• Overgrowth has been reworked and now applies Rejuvenation (based on the rank of the spell) to the targeted party, this has a 60 second cooldown and a 2.5 second cast time. Developer’s note: The previous iteration of Overgrowth had mixed reception partially due to its heavy mana cost and feeling like it “doesn’t belong in vanilla”. In addition to that, it didn’t quite solve the problem it set out to solve, which was to give Druids more strength in healing a group in dungeons primarily in moments that are scary, but not scary enough to warrant a Tranquility. This new version of Overgrowth essentially operates like a Circle of Healing, but applying Rejuvenation to each target instead, including pets in that party.
• Dreamstate has been increased by 1% per rank, causing it to be 15% at rank 3, up from 12%.
• Periodic damage dealt by Moonfire increased by 30%, base damage increased by 15%. The coefficient of Moonfire’s initial hit has been increased to 42.9%, up from 15%. Developer’s note: To provide additional context due to how extreme this appears, Moonfire was a DPS loss in some cases previously and required hefty buffs just to continue fitting in the rotation, but additionally Balance itself needed help.

Hunter

• Mana cost of Steady Shot has been reduced by 5.

Shaman

• Shamanistic Rage has undergone a formula rewrite to provide greater consistency across weapon types and to fix an issue where having a fast off-hand weapon with a slow main-hand would generate extreme amounts of mana. The general potency of the spell has not changed much.
• Adjusted the stats on the Elemental Shaman Dungeon Set 2 armor set to include slightly less spell hit chance than before, the chestplate has been reitemized to grant some additional spell damage in the form of Nature Spell Damage and Fire Spell Damage.

Rogue

• Rogue’s 8pc Dungeon Set 2 armor set effect now has a 25% chance instead of occurring on every critical hit, in addition the Energy generated has been reduced from 20 to 15. Developer’s note: This is a chance on cast, not a chance on hit, meaning it can now only proc once from a single cast of Mutilate.
• Rogue’s 6pc Dungeon Set 2 armor set effect has been reworked and now increases the attack speed gained from Slice and Dice by an additional 5%.
• Rogue’s 4pc Dungeon Set 2 armor set effect has been reworked and now reduces your damage taken from Area of Effect attacks by 15%.

Note: The above changes revolving around Talents have not yet been pushed to our Talent Calculator as it will be merged with the website upgrade due soon.

Rethinking Undead Racial Knowledge

After reviewing feedback and our own goals, we realized we weren’t fully satisfied with how the Undead Racial Knowledge and Cosmetic Racials were implemented—especially when it came to Rotten Rations, which lacked flavor, and Cannibalize, which felt underwhelming as a purely cosmetic option. To address this, we’ve made a few key changes.

First, Cannibalize has returned as a mainline Racial Knowledge ability, meaning it can now be learned by other races. However, we’ve taken care to ensure it fits thematically for each race. Only Undead will actually consume the corpse, while others might pray for the fallen, study the body for tactical insights, or perform some other fitting ritual. In every case, though, the ability remains dependent on the presence of a corpse—bringing back that important gameplay context.

This change left the Undead in need of a new Cosmetic Racial, and we’re excited to introduce Body Modification. This racial allows Undead players to temporarily assume the appearance of any creature flagged as Undead. To make this more interesting, we’ve expanded it to include Forsaken NPCs as valid targets—opening up a wide variety of visual options found throughout the world. While there are some restrictions (sorry, no turning into Thaddius), the vast majority of Undead and Forsaken models are fair game.

Odds & Ends, Wins & Fixes

While much of our focus this month was on major systems, polish, and media prep, we also racked up a number of smaller but meaningful victories across the board. These might not headline a trailer, but they’re the kind of improvements that help bring the whole project together:

• Stratholme is finally “done”

Anyone who played during Beta 3 will understand what a milestone this is. The dungeon’s original scripting was a mess, leading to a cascade of issues that made it one of our most painful zones to maintain. After countless hours of fixes and testing, we’re now confident enough to call it complete—with the handful of remaining bugs so minor, they’re not worth holding up anything for.

• Baradin Hold final tuning pass

We’ve made a number of adjustments to improve the pacing and clarity of Baradin Hold. This included significant reductions to trash health and damage, better-tuned timers for boss and trash mechanics, and various nerfs and tweaks across the board to bring the instance in line with our broader dungeon balance goals.

• Endgame dungeon bugs are (almost) done

Outside of a single boss in Blackrock Spire still being worked on, we now consider endgame dungeon bug fixing complete. This marks a major milestone for stability and playability as we shift our focus toward launch polish and final testing.

• PvP towers expanded for launch

One open-world tower objective didn’t feel like enough—so we’ve gone ahead and enabled the Eastern Plaguelands PvP towers for launch! This required a bit of extra development work, but we think it’ll be worth it to expand the scale and flavor of world PvP at level cap.

Little things like these may not grab headlines, but each one is another step toward a more stable, more polished Project Epoch. Every bug squashed and tweak made now pays off in the player experience later—and we’re happy to keep chipping away.

Community Shoutout

We wanted to take a moment to shoutout Github user ulmetrs who only 5 days ago appeared out of nowhere to shower us with new contributions to our open source Core including fixes to allow it to build on new Visual Studio versions, performance improvements focused around wandering creatures, an optimized implementation of Auction House result sorting, key fixes around NPC’s facing the wrong direction when casting certain spells and finally fixes around reputation reactions not passing down to child reactions.

Moments like this are exactly why we keep our core open source and we hope this fixes can trickle out to the other open source projects that exist.

We also wanted to give an extra shoutout to all community members who have or are currently donating via Github Sponsors this has directly led to us being able to commision various aspects of our upcoming trailer and Website 2.0.

Looking Ahead

With much of the behind-the-scenes groundwork now complete and several ongoing tasks handed off to commissioned contributors, we’re thrilled to be back in a place where nearly the entire team can focus squarely on the game itself. May marks a shift back to hands-on development, polish, and final content passes as we enter the home stretch.

Project Epoch is now extremely close to launch, and we can’t wait to kick off the final countdown. Once the trailer drops, the release date is revealed, and Website 2.0 goes live, we expect the hypetrain to be running full speed—and we’ll be right there with you.

Thank you all for your continued patience and support. It’s been a long journey to get here, and we’re incredibly grateful to have such a passionate and engaged community along for the ride. The finish line is in sight—and we’re almost there.