THE WOW FOREVER COLLECTION · DISPATCH · RESEARCH CHECKED SEPTEMBER 23, 2026
Short answer: a new WoW Forever beta client, build 1.60.1.69977, went out on the evening of September 22 Pacific (the early hours of September 23 in Europe), and its official notes are three lines long: Mac display and stability fixes, gamepad navigation on the character select screen, and gamepad interaction with quest-giving items. Around it, Blizzard shipped three server-side fixes that never got a patch note of their own: a second, working repair of the Skyborne quest "A Firm Response," a full restart of the beta realms to free characters locked out with "character with that name already exists," and a routing fix for EU testers. The next full weekly update is scheduled for September 24. The memory leak is not mentioned anywhere.
If you searched for "hotfixes September 22" and landed on Blizzard's news post, that one is Midnight only. It has Death Knight, Demon Hunter and raid tuning under September 22 and nothing under a Forever heading. The Forever changes live in community manager Kaivax's forum posts, and this page collects them.
The full notes for build 1.60.1.69977
Kaivax's post, titled "Beta Client Update - September 22" on the US forum and "23 September" on the EU one, reads in full:
A new client build is now available to Beta testers via the Battle.net App: WoW Forever 1.60.1 Build 69977
- Fixed some display issues and stability issues on Macs.
- Controller navigation should now work more properly in the character selection screen if you launch with gamepad active.
- You can now interact with items that give you quests on gamepad.
This client build also includes other fixes for issues that are not testable in-game.
Our next full weekly update is coming on September 24.
That is the entire changelog. The "not testable in-game" line means backend and tooling fixes that testers cannot see, which is normal for a beta build. It also means the eight items on the September 18 known issues list tagged "fixed in the next Beta build," including Waylaid Crates, Starshards not gaining Twilight Focus, Vengeance proccing from periodic crits and the Coldridge Valley map reveal, are not confirmed as part of this build. Kaivax did not mention them, and testers in the thread did not report them fixed. The September 24 weekly update is the more likely home for those.
To get the build, fully quit and relaunch the Battle.net app so it picks up the update. The build number shows at the bottom left of the login screen. One EU tester hit error BLZBNTAGT0000138F on the update and got past it by restarting the app; if that does not work, the standard fix is to run Scan and Repair from the game's options menu in Battle.net.
What the Mac fix actually fixed
This is the part worth reading carefully, because "fixed some display issues and stability issues on Macs" covers one enormous fix and leaves several visible bugs in place.
The enormous fix is the kernel panic. Since September 17, Apple Silicon Macs with Secondary Lighting set above Fair would hang the GPU on Enter World and reboot the whole machine. The 151-reply "Mac client crashing" thread was about this. It is fixed. A tester posting as Ethereal, who had isolated eight separate Mac graphics faults to individual settings with repro steps for each, re-ran the whole list against build 69977 and reports Secondary Lighting at High now "loads and plays." Three other Mac testers in the update thread confirm Secondary Lighting no longer crashes, one on a MacBook Pro M1 with 8 GB and macOS 27. The banding on trunks and walls from Optional GPU Features also appears fixed, and Ethereal now runs all four Compatibility Settings enabled where two of them previously had to be off.
What is still broken on Mac after the build, from the same re-test and the update thread:
- Colour channel loss with Triple Buffering or Advanced Work Submit on. Still present. Colour channels get written to zero one at a time.
- Black foliage above Shadow Quality Low. Still present at Fair, High and Ultra. Several testers describe "black grass" and crushed textures.
- The green cast on a fresh launch. Still present from the first rendered frame. One tester says the green tint on shadows at Fair is gone after 20 minutes of testing; another still sees it above Medium lighting. Treat this one as partially fixed at best.
- Volumetric light disappearing above Shadow Quality Low. Still present, which is why one tester reports having to keep Shadows at Fair "otherwise the fog disappears."
- New on this build: a shadow boundary that travels with the player. Terrain shadows are correct beyond a hard line and gapped nearer than it.
- New on this build: black water above Shadow Quality Low. Water renders solid black, 97 to 99 percent of pixels at exactly zero, when you walk into it or change Shadow Quality. Dropping the setting back does not clear it. Typing /console gxRestart does. A Windows tester in the same thread reports black water too, so this may not be Mac only.
The practical Mac setup after 69977 is therefore: Secondary Lighting wherever you like, Shadow Quality on Low, and gxRestart if the water goes black. That is a better place than a week ago, when the advice was "do not enter the world above graphics quality 1."
Performance on Mac is a separate story and the reports are split. The M1 tester says frame rate "noticeably improved" in the Skyborne starting zone. A Mac mini M6 owner says the crashes are gone but the game is now "severely compromised" and the previous workarounds no longer help. An M5 Max owner reports frame rate tanking to 10 in combat, a new problem for that machine. And a plain "performance is still awful on mac" sits in between. The likely explanation is that the crash fix changed what the renderer does with lighting and shadows, and some of that work moved from "crashes" to "runs slowly." Blizzard has not said.
The realm restart and the locked characters
The other big event on September 22 was not a hotfix. It was a restart.
Around 8:15 p.m. Eastern on September 21 the beta realms announced a 15-minute restart. Some characters that were mid-transition when it landed, on the Menethil Harbor boat in the most-cited report, never made it through the loading screen and stayed flagged as online on the server. When those players tried to log back in they got "character with that name already exists," and the automatic logout that normally clears a ghost session never fired. Twelve hours later they were still locked out. Several threads with the same complaint reached 150 replies between them.
Kaivax posted three times in the largest thread on the morning of September 22 Pacific. First, a request for the locked character's name and the exact time of the last successful play session, "so that we can narrow our log search." Then, in reply to a player suggesting Blizzard "just unplug and replug the server": "About the same time you posted this, a Senior Game Producer told me that he wants to restart Beta realms today. Good thinkin'." And to a player asking what Blizzard was doing: "Gathering as much information as possible, so that we can be sure of our understanding of both the issue and our fix for it."
The restart happened that night. The original poster's final edit reads "1:18 EST, server restart fixed it," which puts the restart at roughly 10:15 p.m. Pacific on September 22. A related thread, where a character stopped being able to cast, loot or attack after a disconnect and then hung on "retrieving character list" forever, got the same request for details from Kaivax and the same resolution from the restart. If you were locked out and can now log in, that is why. If you are still locked out, post the character's full name and the time you last played it in the beta forum, because that is what the log search runs on.
"A Firm Response," fixed on the second try
The Skyborne starting-zone quest "A Firm Response" was the most-reported quest bug of the first week. You walk up to Belathaan Brightwish near the Shrine of Akir on Zephras Isle to start an event, Lorthuna spawns, and then the whole thing locks up and the Windshaper Skyborne cannot proceed. At least 17 players confirmed it in the US thread alone.
Kaivax's hotfix post is short and unusually candid:
Today, we've fixed an issue with the quest "A Firm Response." ... We attempted a fix a couple of days ago, but it didn't work. Today's fix looks like it worked, and we're seeing testers complete the quest.
That went up on September 21. The first attempt, around September 19, did not take, which explains why players who read "fixed" on the known issues list still could not finish it over the weekend. It is server-side, so you do not need the new client build for it.
EU routing
Also on September 21, Kaivax posted "Addressing EU Beta Routing Issues." Over the first two days of the beta, EU testers had trouble moving, interacting with the world, and staying connected. The post says that "over the last 24 hours, we've developed and implemented solutions to streamline routing to the Beta for the EU region," with the caveat that some remaining problems may sit with ISPs, upstream routes or local firewall software, outside Blizzard's control. If your EU character still rubber-bands, the post asks you to report it with your ISP and location. This is the fix PC Gamer and others covered as "Blizzard fixed EU lag"; it is a routing change on Blizzard's side, not a client patch.
What is not in the notes: the memory leak
Nothing in build 69977's notes mentions memory, VRAM or frame rate falling over time, and testers on the new build report the same behaviour as before. One player in the update thread describes 60 frames per second dropping into the 30s with stuttering after the patch, which is the exact signature from the week before. Another asked Kaivax directly for a "memory leak timeline" and got no reply. The one relevant thing in the notes is the phrase "other fixes for issues that are not testable in-game," which could cover anything, but a client memory leak is very testable in-game, so it is safer to assume it is not in this build.
Our memory leak field guide has the measured leak rates and the relog workaround, and it still applies on 69977. We will re-measure after the September 24 update.
What is not in the notes: Auto Shot and wands without a wind-up
The most-discussed class change of the week has no patch note either, because it was not a hotfix. Wowhead published a piece on September 22 titled "Hunter Auto-Shot and Wanding Casting Time Reduced in WoW: Forever," reporting that the hidden half-second cast time on Auto Shot and wand attacks, which forced Classic players to stand still before each shot fired, has been "reduced significantly" in Forever. The article's evidence is a pair of side-by-side videos from a Reddit user, not a Blizzard statement.
Testers noticed it before Wowhead did. An EU thread titled "Kiting is too easy with auto-shoot and wands" and a US thread called "Auto Shot Clipping?" both date from the weekend, and a "Wanding Is most OP Spec" thread claims a level 20 wand Priest out-damages its own spells. A separate bug report from September 22, "Instant Cast Spells Issue," describes the flip side: instant abilities now reset or delay the swing timer for Hunters, Shamans and Druids, and the ranged timer sometimes alternates between instant and a full wind-up. A community bug tracker on GitHub logged a related 0.1 to 0.4 second delay on the next Auto Shot after any shot ability, and traces it to the retry timer that fires when ranged spells were given automatic attack-start behaviour.
So the honest state of it is: the wind-up is shorter than Classic, on purpose or not, Blizzard has not said which, and there is at least one genuine timer bug tangled up with it. If you are levelling a Hunter in the beta, do not build habits around the current feel. It is the kind of thing that changes in a Wednesday update.
New reports since the build
Things testers raised in the update thread that were not there before, or that the build did not touch:
- Addon settings not saving. Two separate reports that unit frame and other SavedVariables reset every session, which blocks addon testing. This predates the build and was not fixed by it.
- "No realms are available" on login for at least one tester right after updating. Usually clears with a relaunch after a build rolls out.
- "Wounds of Betrayal got broken." One report of a quest regressing on the new build, with no detail. Unconfirmed.
- Gamepad, the wish list. The people who asked for controller support are mostly happy with the fixes and immediately asked for the next things: targeting critters (which blocks quests like Sickly Gazelle on gamepad), an auto-attack indicator, the character turning toward its target, saving gamepad layouts, remapping the face buttons, and Edit Mode support for the gamepad UI. The fishing bobber can also land outside interaction range on controller.
What comes next
Kaivax has committed to a "full weekly update" on September 24. That is the most likely delivery for the eight known-issues fixes tagged for the next build, and possibly for the level 30 cap, which Blizzard has said arrives "a couple of weeks" after the September 17 start. Two weeks is October 1, so a Wednesday cap raise on either September 24 or October 1 fits; nothing has been announced. We will update this page and the beta guide when the September 24 notes post.
If you are on a Mac, update today; the crash fix alone is worth it. If you are on Windows or Linux, the build changes nothing you will feel except the gamepad fixes, and the relog-every-hour routine for the leak stays in place. The live streams page shows who is playing on the new build right now.
Sources: Kaivax's Beta Client Update - September 22 (US) and 23 September (EU) posts and the tester replies beneath them; Kaivax's "A Firm Response" Hotfixed post (September 21) and the US bug thread; the "Character with that name already exists" thread with Kaivax's three September 22 replies and the stuck-on-login thread; Addressing EU Beta Routing Issues (September 21); Ethereal's Mac graphics bugs re-test against build 69977; the September 18 known issues list; Blizzard's Hotfixes: September 22, 2026 (Midnight only); Wowhead's Auto-Shot and Wanding article; the Instant Cast Spells Issue thread; and the forever-bugs Auto Shot retry timer issue.