Travel Time Is a Cost in Forever
Every gold figure on this site is measured at one end of a journey or the other. Nothing on it counts the journey itself. This is the attempt: what the road takes out of an evening, who sells a way around it, and which part of that is still unconfirmed.
Income is measured, the trip is not
We count money in 2 directions. One is what a run brings back, which is the arithmetic behind gold a dungeon run returns, and it starts at the first pull. The other is what leaves the purse again, which is the subject of coin drained by repair and training, and it starts at a counter in a city. Between those 2 points sits the part neither of them records: the half hour of road that put the character at the instance door, and the second half hour that brought the loot back to a mailbox.
That gap is not a rounding error. An evening is a fixed number of hours, and whatever is spent walking is not spent gathering, killing or selling. A flight path charges a handful of coins and then charges something far more expensive, which is the stretch of time you sit watching a map. A corpse run charges nothing at a vendor and still takes the same bite out of the evening, which is why what dying takes from a run reads differently once the walk back is included in it.
The practical effect is that 2 routes with the same output per hour of active farming are not worth the same. The one that sits 1 flight and a short ride from a mailbox pays more per evening than the one that needs a ferry, a long road and a detour to a trainer, even though no figure anywhere on either route says so.
Nothing pulls a group to the dungeon door
In later versions of the game a group assembles anywhere and arrives together, because a stone at the entrance does the travelling for them. In the Classic shape of the world that stone forms a meeting group and nothing more: it does not move a body across a continent. If Forever keeps that behaviour, then the time cost of a 5-man run is not the run. It is 5 people each making their own way to the same door, and the group moving only as fast as the slowest of them.
That changes who is cheap to invite. A player already standing in the zone costs nothing to add. A player on the other continent costs the whole group a wait, and the wait is paid by everyone, not by the one who is late. Guilds solve it informally by running with whoever is nearby rather than with whoever is best, and that choice shows up in output rather than in any posted price.
What we have not confirmed: we have not seen a Blizzard statement or patch note describing how summoning stones behave in Forever, and we have not seen one stating they are absent. The paragraphs above describe the Classic behaviour and what follows from it. If a stone that summons is added, the cost described here mostly disappears, and we will say so rather than leave the argument standing.
The warlock is the only shortcut anyone sells
Where a stone does not move people, a class ability does. A summon needs the warlock at the destination and 2 other players to help channel it, which is why the service is never a single transaction between 2 strangers: it is a small standing arrangement, usually a warlock with an alt or a guildmate parked somewhere useful. What that is worth in coin, and how the asking price moves with distance and time of night, is the trade described in gold charged for a summon.
It belongs to a wider group of incomes that never produce an item. Nothing is gathered, nothing is crafted and nothing reaches a listing, yet gold changes hands, which is the pattern behind minutes sold as a class service. For the buyer the maths is simple and rarely written down: the summon is worth paying for whenever the coin costs less than the stretch of evening it gives back, and worth refusing whenever the walk is short or the gold is scarce.
This is also the only part of travel with a visible price. Everything else in this guide is paid in hours and never appears in a trade window, which is exactly why it is so easy to leave out of a plan.
Turning hours into a number you can use
The honest way to count a route is to start the clock when you leave the city and stop it when the last item is sold, not when the last node is mined. Done that way, the first riding tier stops looking like a vanity purchase and starts looking like a bulk purchase of evenings, which is the frame used in what riding training costs. The same logic decides whether a second gathering character is worth parking near its route rather than hauling the main across the map twice a night.
Group travel has its own arithmetic. 3 people farming one area move as 1 unit and pay the road once between them, while the same 3 farming separately pay it 3 times, and that difference is part of what farming in a group versus alone weighs up. It is also why a route that is worse on paper can win: short approach, mailbox at the end, nothing to cross.
None of this needs a spreadsheet. It needs one habit, which is refusing to describe an evening by the hour that went well and describing it by the hours you were actually logged in.
Questions
Does Forever have summoning stones at dungeon entrances?
We have not seen this settled either way. No Blizzard statement or patch note we have read describes summoning stone behaviour in Forever. In the Classic shape of the world the stone forms a meeting group and does not pull anyone to the door, and this guide reasons from that behaviour while saying plainly that it is an assumption rather than a confirmed rule.
Is paying for a warlock summon worth it?
It depends entirely on what the walk would have cost you. A summon that saves a short ride is rarely worth coin, while one that saves a continental crossing plus a ferry can be worth it even to a player who is short on gold, because the alternative is losing a large part of the evening. The question to ask is not what the summon costs but how many minutes it returns.
Does a mount remove the travel cost?
It reduces it, it does not remove it. Faster ground travel shortens every leg of a route but still leaves the approach, the return trip and the detours to trainers and mailboxes. The useful way to judge the training bill is as a purchase of time across every evening you will play afterwards, rather than as a one-off expense against a single farming session.
How should travel appear in a gold-per-hour estimate?
Inside the hour, not outside it. If the clock only runs while you are gathering or killing, the figure describes a part of the evening you cannot actually repeat for the whole evening. Start counting when you leave the city and stop when the last stack is sold, and 2 routes that looked identical will usually separate by a wide margin.
Sources
- Blizzard's official news hub, where patch notes and feature descriptions for Forever are published. We have not found a statement there on summoning stone behaviour. — World of Warcraft news.