World of Warcraft: Forever's release is just around the corner, but developer Blizzard is making one final pass at the game's racial abilities before launch in response to beta feedback.

In a forum post, WoW community manager Kaivax posted a list of significant changes to many of each race's unique abilities that players expressed concerns about during Forever's beta. Those changes include tweaks to tauren, humans, orcs, dwarves, and Skyborne elves.

"In taking a final pass on these, we've prioritized racial identity, which means that some races will naturally be slightly more effective than others at certain combat roles," Blizzard said. "In some places where we had replaced role or class-focused racials with generic ones, we're rolling those changes back."

The exception to that mindset is weapon-specialization abilities, Blizzard said, which existed for humans and orcs both in WoW Classic and early on in Forever's beta and made each race more effective with specific types of weapons.

"While those have a strong fantasy component to them, it is not healthy in the long run for future raid and dungeon loot tables to be evaluated through the lens of 'required' weapon types," Blizzard said. "At the same time, we're doing a tuning pass on some of the remaining passive bonuses to help ensure that they aren't skewing outcomes in a way that limits player preferences." 

Humans, widely viewed by the community as one of the most "optimal" races to pick thanks to their powerful passive abilities, have lost some of their power in combat.

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