Tagging and Respawn Set Your Gold Ceiling
A farming route is not limited by how fast you can kill. It is limited by who owns the kill, how quickly the camp comes back, and how often the corpse carries anything worth posting. Those 3 rules sit under every gold-per-hour claim ever written, and they are the part most of those claims leave out.
The first hit decides who gets paid
Under the Classic ruleset a mob belongs to whoever lands the first damage or the first hostile effect. Anyone else can help, and nobody else is paid for it: the credit goes to one player or one party, the corpse carries loot for them alone, and a second character who arrives mid-fight leaves with the time spent and nothing in the bag. Retail has moved away from that with shared credit on open-world targets. Forever is built on the older behaviour, and nothing published so far describes a shared tag outside grouped content.
That one rule turns a busy zone into a race rather than a queue. Two farmers working the same camp do not each take half of it; the faster one earns and the slower one walks. This is the mechanic that quietly breaks most income estimates, because estimates are measured on an empty route. On a populated route the same loop returns whatever share of spawns a character actually wins, and that share depends on pull speed, on class, and on how many targets can be held at once.
Which is why the competition question comes before the route question. How many other farmers stand between you and the camp is partly a technical matter, and how layers split a realm changes the headcount in a zone without changing the spawn table. The rest is a choice of method: solo and group farming compared comes out differently once tags are exclusive, and mage AoE pull farming wins contested camps for a reason that has nothing to do with damage per second.
Respawn is the throughput limit, not your keyboard
Every camp refills on its own clock. Once a farmer clears it faster than it comes back, the route stops being a kill loop and becomes a waiting loop, and everything gained from better gear or a better rotation lands in the gap between pulls instead of in the purse. The practical ceiling of a spot is therefore set by the spawn table and not by the character standing on it, which is the uncomfortable part: past a certain point, playing better earns nothing more at that camp.
Two consequences follow. The first is that good routes are built to be long enough that the first pull has reset by the time the loop returns, so the character is always moving rather than standing. The second is that adding a second farmer to a saturated camp does not double output, it splits it. That splitting is where travel time against income starts to matter, because the answer to a crowded camp is usually a longer circuit rather than a faster one.
Gathering nodes behave the same way with a different clock, and they are contested by a wider group, since anyone passing through can take one without fighting for it. How often that happens is partly a realm setting rather than a route problem, and farming speed by realm type changes how many of those nodes a character reaches undisturbed.
Drop rate is what turns kills into coin
A farming hour is 3 numbers multiplied together: how many kills you win, how often those kills drop the item, and what the item sells for. Only the first is under a player's control. The second is fixed by the loot table, and it is the reason two players running the same route for the same hour can report very different results and both be telling the truth. Short sessions measure variance, not income, and anything with a low drop chance needs far more hours than most people run before the average shows up.
That is why steady routes are built on the common half of the table. Vendor trash, reagents and cloth arrive on a predictable share of kills and pay the same every evening, while the rare pieces are a bonus nobody should budget around. The split is worth understanding before planning: rare BoE drops as income behave like a lottery ticket attached to an otherwise ordinary loop.
The same arithmetic sets the production cost of every crafted good on the realm. If a reagent drops on a small fraction of kills, the hours behind one stack do not disappear because somebody undercuts; they turn into a floor that sellers eventually return to. That floor is what what reagents can sell for is measured against, and it moves only when the drop rate or the competition for the camp moves.
What we cannot check yet
We have not seen published respawn timers or drop tables for Forever, and Blizzard does not normally publish either. Everything above is the shape of the mechanic, not a measurement of this realm. Numbers carried over from other Classic versions are a guess until somebody checks them on these servers, and zone-by-zone tuning is exactly the sort of thing that gets adjusted quietly between builds.
We also have no statement confirming that open-world tagging on Forever works exactly as it did in the original, only the absence of any announcement that it does not. If a change to shared credit, to loot assignment or to spawn density is published or reproduced consistently on the beta, it belongs on this page with the source attached. Until then, treat the rules as inherited and the pacing as unmeasured.
Questions
Does a player who helps kill a tagged mob get any loot?
No. Under exclusive tagging the kill credit and the loot belong to whoever tagged the target first, and a second player who adds damage afterwards receives nothing from that corpse. That is the default Classic behaviour and nothing published about Forever describes shared credit in the open world.
Do layers change how tagging works?
They change who is standing next to you, not the rule itself. A layer is another copy of the same zone with the same spawn table, so competition for a camp depends on how many farmers share your copy at that moment. The tag still goes to the first hit either way.
Does spawn density increase when more players are in a zone?
We have no public information about spawn tuning on Forever and no beta reports we would treat as measurements, so we assume density is fixed until shown otherwise. If it does scale, it would soften crowding at launch and would need to be confirmed rather than inferred from a busy evening.
Why do gold-per-hour figures stop matching once a realm fills up?
Because they are almost always recorded on an empty route where every spawn is yours and nothing is waiting on a respawn clock. On a populated realm you win only a share of the camp, and that share, not your damage output, becomes the number that decides the evening.
Sources
- Blizzard's own channel for ruleset and patch announcements; we check it for any change to tagging, loot assignment or spawn behaviour — World of Warcraft news.