Forever

World of Warcraft: Forever is Blizzard’s long-term home in original Azeroth — a third permanent WoW experience alongside modern (Retail) World of Warcraft and Classic. It is not a season, a limited event, or a reskin of Classic ERA. The setting sits in a time bubble after Warcraft III Reforged: Forsaken Kingdom and before Molten Core, with a level cap of 60 for the foreseeable future.

Fans asked for Classic+ for years. Forever is Blizzard’s answer: keep the journey, the world, and the social texture of early WoW, then add new roads that vanilla never opened. New zones, quests, dungeons, and raids land inside that first-year Azeroth instead of marching the timeline forward.

Forever launches globally on November 4, 2026, at 3:00 p.m. PST. A beta runs from September 17 through October 21, 2026. Access to the live game is included with a World of Warcraft Subscription or Game Time — there is no separate expansion purchase required to play.

Optional Battle.net packs (Skyborne Heroic, Skyborne Epic, and the limited-time Warcraft Forever Collection) add cosmetics, name reservation, and, on the higher tiers, beta access. The first new raids are scheduled to unlock on December 9, 2026, with more world content, dungeons, PvP, and a Hardcore ruleset on the roadmap after launch.

Launch content is built around a 1–60 journey with more than a thousand new quests. Four zones headline the first wave: Zephras Isle, a renewed Mount Hyjal, Riverglades, and Shen’dralas. Nine new dungeons sit alongside two new raids — Barrow Deeps (10-player) and Hyjal Summit (20-player) — plus the Darkspear Islands 15v15 battleground.

The Skyborne are a new neutral race from Zephras Isle. Alliance Skyborne lean Mage; Horde Skyborne lean Shaman, with Warrior, Hunter, Rogue, and Druid also available. Six additional race and class combinations arrive at launch: Gnome Priest, Human Hunter, Dwarf Shaman, Orc Mage, Troll Warlock, and Undead Paladin.

• Level cap 60, with no flying and no level scaling.
• Systems such as Legacy progression, camping and campfires, optional transmog, HD/SD models, a Classic visual preset, gamepad support, and hundreds of new profession recipes.
• Design intent: the world is the main character, and the journey matters as much as the destination.

Forever is realmless. You pick a ruleset instead of a classic realm list: Normal (consent PvP), PvP (open-world conflict), and Roleplaying at launch. Grouping stays inside a ruleset. Character names use a first and last name, and Alliance and Horde remain separate.

Hardcore is a fourth ruleset planned after launch — not a separately sold game. See the Forever Hardcore armory for permadeath rules, transfer-out behavior, and the survival stats this site will track.

Classic ERA preserves original vanilla as a faithful snapshot. Season of Discovery experiments with runes and seasonal resets on that same era. Forever keeps the level-60 feel but is a permanent product with ongoing new content inside the time bubble — new zones and raids rather than a frozen 2004/2019 recreation.

If you want the unaltered vanilla ladder, stay on ERA. If you want a living Classic+ world with new stories at 60, Forever is the armory to watch. This site already tracks ERA, Anniversary, MoP, SoD, and Classic Hardcore; Forever joins that list as character data becomes available.

This Forever armory is live so you can search, compare, and browse leaderboards and population as soon as Battle.net character data exists. Until then, the pages use the same layout as every other version — hero, search, leaderboard previews, and recent scans — and will fill in as realms and profiles come online.

Expect gear score and item-level rankings, honorable kills, guild pages, and population breakdowns in the same shape as Classic. Hardcore-specific deaths, Mak’Gora, and survival stats live on Forever Hardcore.