Spell Reagents Are a Bill Every Class Pays
Repairs, mounts and trainers are counted in every budget written before launch. The quieter line is the one attached to the spellbook: a resurrection that wants a candle, a portal that wants a rune, a shot that wants arrows. It is paid on every character, it never stops, and it decides which crafters get work.
The cost attached to the class, not the gear
Every character carries 2 kinds of running cost. The first is shared by all of them: repairs, travel, food and water, the lines most plans already include. The second belongs to the class and to nothing else. A resurrection spell that consumes a candle, a teleport that consumes a rune, a ranged attack that consumes arrows, a summon that consumes a shard. These leave the bags through casting rather than through dying, and they are bought back on every character that has them. No gear list records that spend.
It is worth separating from the general shopping that already has a home in a budget. The restock of water and bandages is shared out across the roster and overlaps with what upkeep costs per class in the ordinary sense, while a reagent is tied to one button and stops mattering the moment that button is not pressed. A character who never resurrects anybody buys no candles. A character who does it for the group buys them every week, and the group rarely offers to split it.
In the version Forever is built on, the lines look roughly like this, and we are describing the system rather than a published Forever list:
- casters who resurrect or buff a whole raid buy vendor reagents by the stack
- portal and teleport spells consume their own runes, one per cast
- ranged weapons eat ammunition, and the stack has to be replaced mid-evening
- summoning and soulstone work runs on shards that have to be farmed rather than bought
- poisons and similar per-use coatings are a vendor purchase before every pull list
Reagents are a bag problem before they are a gold problem
The part that surprises people is not the vendor tab, it is the space. Ammunition sits in its own slot only if a quiver or an ammo pouch is equipped, shards accumulate one per kill and need somewhere to live, and a raid-wide buff reagent is carried in stacks because running back to a city mid-night costs more time than the reagent costs coin. That is before any crafting material, quest item or loot goes in. The bill quietly becomes a demand for crafted bag supply at launch.
This is where the class spend turns into somebody else's income. Quivers, ammo pouches and shard bags are made by leatherworkers and tailors, ammunition itself is an engineering line, and all 3 trades sell into a buyer list that refills itself as characters level. A player who plans space in bags and bank around 16-slot generics ends up paying twice: once for the container and once again when the specialised one turns out to be the thing that actually frees up room.
On a roster the arithmetic repeats. Each new character arrives with the same empty bags and the same starting reagents, which is why the starting cost of an alt is heavier for classes that carry 2 or 3 consumed lines than for a class that carries none.
Vendors set the floor, crafters set the rest
Most spell reagents come from a vendor at a fixed price, usually one standing near the trainer. That has 2 consequences worth stating. The vendor price is a ceiling nobody can beat on the auction house, so these items are not a flipping market, and the supply never runs out, so a shortage is a travel problem rather than a scarcity problem. What varies is how far the character has to walk, which is why players stockpile before a raid night instead of buying per cast.
The items that are not vendor-sold behave in the opposite way. Containers, ammunition above the vendor grades and anything made at a bench are priced by whoever bothered to level the trade, and that sits in the same queue as commissioned crafting orders for the rest of the realm. A crafter with the recipe and the materials is selling into steady, boring, repeating demand, which is the kind that survives after the first raid tier is cleared.
Alongside that runs the drink side of the same bill. A caster paying for reagents is usually paying for what mana restocking costs in the same trip, and the 2 purchases share a trip to town, a bag row and a pre-raid checklist with the weekly consumable shelf.
What we do not know about the Forever list
Forever has not published a per-class reagent list, and the profession rework makes the old one an assumption rather than a fact. The team has said it considered parts of the original uneven and is adding recipes across the trades, so containers and ammunition could change grade, price or availability before the 4 November start. We have no figures for any of it and are not going to invent them.
What is safe to plan around is the shape rather than the amount. Classes with consumed reagents pay more to play than classes without them, the spend lands on every character separately, and the bag row it occupies is as real a cost as the coin. If Forever removes a reagent line, the saving goes to the players who already budgeted for it. If it keeps them, nothing in the paragraphs above has to be rewritten.
One thing we are watching specifically is whether quivers and shard bags keep their separate slot behaviour, because that single rule decides whether the class bill is a container purchase or a permanent 4-slot tax on the bags. We will update crafting reagent prices coverage when there is something published rather than inferred.
Questions
Is the reagent bill large compared with repairs and travel?
We do not publish figures and Forever has not published a reagent list, so we cannot give a ratio. The structural difference is that repairs scale with deaths and travel scales with distance, while reagents scale with how often a specific spell is cast. A raid healer resurrecting through a learning night pays a line that a solo player on the same character never touches.
Can spell reagents be flipped on the auction house?
The vendor-sold ones, no. A fixed vendor price acts as a ceiling, supply never runs out, and anybody who wants a stack can walk to the trainer district and buy one. The money in this part of the economy sits with the containers and the ammunition made at a bench, where supply depends on who levelled the trade.
Which classes pay nothing at all?
Classes whose abilities consume no item still pay the shared costs, but they skip the per-cast line entirely. In practice that means they spend their bag rows on crafting materials and loot instead of on shards, ammunition or buff reagents, which is a quiet advantage when a route runs long and the bags fill up.
Should a new character stock reagents before levelling or buy as needed?
Buying as needed is cheaper in coin and more expensive in time, since a vendor trip costs travel. Most players settle on a middle course: carry enough for one evening, restock during the trip to town that is already happening for repairs, and only stockpile before a scheduled raid night.
Sources
- Blizzard's own Forever pages, for profession and recipe changes announced before launch — World of Warcraft official site.
- Spell and reagent data for the Classic-era systems Forever builds on — Wowhead Classic database.