Who Opens Locked Boxes in Forever
A locked box is loot that arrives useless. Opening it is not a craft and not a gather, it is one ability and one consumable item, and the whole trade happens outside the auction house. This is how that narrow market works and where it is still unclear.
A box nobody can open is just weight
A locked box is the only loot that lands in a bag doing nothing. The contents are ordinary enough — coin, a trade good, sometimes a green — but the box itself is weight until somebody with the right skill touches it. That gap between finding and opening is what creates a market. The finder holds supply of a thing no other player wants in its current state, the opener holds a skill that costs almost nothing to use, and the two of them settle it in a trade window.
Nearly everything else in this economy reaches a buyer through a listing. This does not. There is no item to post, no stack to undercut and no record afterwards, so what the auction house can hold leaves this trade out entirely. It sits with the other services that exist only as whispers, which is why the demand for it never appears in any market read, including ours.
One detail decides how convenient the whole thing is: whether a box can change hands at all. Some containers can be handed over or mailed, others have to be opened while the owner stands there. We have not verified the full list of which boxes behave which way in Forever, so treat the handover as something to confirm with the box in front of you rather than a rule you can plan a route around.
The 2 openers: a rogue and a key
Rogues train Pick Lock and use it directly. The skill scales with the character rather than with a trade slot, so a low rogue opens the easy boxes and a higher one opens the rest; nothing is consumed and the opener walks away with the same inventory they arrived with. That is the important half of the pricing: for a rogue standing in a capital anyway, the cost of the service is the walk over and the interruption, not materials. Whatever they are tipped is income with no floor under it.
The other opener is a blacksmith with skeleton keys. Keys are crafted items made from bars at several skill tiers, and each one is spent on a single box. That gives the blacksmith a real material cost and a second option the rogue does not have: the key is an item, so it can be posted and sold to the person holding the box. Anyone who can read a key price has an alternative to hiring an opener, and that quietly caps what a rogue can ask in the same city.
Engineering is the part we will not assert. Explosive charges in Classic are associated with locked doors and chests rather than lockboxes, and we have not seen anything published for Forever that settles whether they touch boxes at all. If you want that answer, test it on a box you can afford to waste rather than taking a forum post for it.
How the service gets priced
Pricing happens where the offer is read. An opener parks in a capital, says what they do, and the box owner either tips or does not; there is no posted rate and no history to check. The rhythm is the same as every other class service in Forever, so where services are advertised matters more here than any skill level does. A rogue nobody can see is a rogue nobody pays.
Three things move the tip. The first is how many openers are standing in the same place at the same hour, which is a head count question rather than a skill one — how many players picked each trade decides whether a blacksmith with keys is a rare find or one of a queue. The second is distance: a box found far from a city either waits in the bank or drags somebody out to it, and hours lost to travel are paid by whoever makes the trip. The third is volume, since one box and a bag of boxes take nearly the same conversation.
Most openers bundle. The same character offering to open boxes is usually offering something else in the same breath, and income earned from class abilities adds up across the evening rather than per click. Our reading is that this stays a tip market rather than a rate market, because the buyer always has the option of carrying the box until a friendlier rogue appears.
What we have not confirmed for Forever
We have seen no patch note changing how Pick Lock scales, no published list of skeleton key tiers for this version, and nothing stating whether Legacy perks touch either side of it. Everything above is written from how the mechanic has worked in Classic and from what testers describe, not from a Blizzard document. If Forever reworked the lock skill or the key recipes, the balance between the rogue and the blacksmith shifts, and the first place it would show is key listings.
We also publish no figures for what an opening costs. Tips are not a price, they vary by city and by hour, and a number written here would be wrong within a week. If you want a sense of the going rate, read the offers in trade for an evening before you ask, and compare it against what a key is selling for — that comparison is the only honest benchmark this market has.
Questions
Can a blacksmith open any locked box?
A blacksmith opens boxes with skeleton keys, and keys are crafted at several skill tiers, so the higher-grade boxes need the higher-grade key and the bars that go into it. Each key is consumed on one box. We have not seen a tier list published for Forever specifically, so check the recipe requirements on your own trainer and the key tooltip rather than assuming the Classic layout carried over unchanged.
Do I have to hand the box over to the opener?
That depends on the box. Some containers can be traded or mailed, which means you can leave them with a rogue or post for a key; others have to be opened while you are standing there with the box in your own bags. We have not verified which boxes fall where in Forever, so the safe habit is to meet the opener in person and watch the box open rather than send it off to a stranger.
Why is this never listed on the auction house?
Because the service is not an item. A rogue cannot post a click, so the whole trade lives in whispers and the trade channel and leaves no record anywhere. The one part of this market that does reach a listing is the skeleton key itself, since a key is a crafted object a blacksmith can sell to whoever is holding the box. That listing is also the only public price signal the market has.
Is it worth levelling a rogue just to open boxes?
Our opinion: no, not on its own. The income is tips with no floor, it arrives only when somebody both finds a box and finds you, and it competes with a crafted key anyone can buy. It is worth something as one line on a character you were going to play anyway, bundled with the other things a rogue can charge for. It is not a reason to add a name to the roster.
Sources
- Blizzard's official site for the Classic line, where patch notes for Forever would appear if lock skill or key recipes change — World of Warcraft official site.