WoW Forever beta: how to get in, the level cap and when it ends

The World of Warcraft: Forever beta opened on 17 September 2026 and ends in late October: most sources give 21 October, a few say 22 October. It is a test of the first half of the climb only. Characters were capped at level 20 for the first two weeks, and on 1 October, after several hours of maintenance, Blizzard raised the cap to 30, where it stays until the beta closes. The full game launches on 4 November 2026 at 3:00 PM PST.

There are two ways in, and only one of them is certain. The free way is to opt in to the beta through Battle.net and wait: Blizzard invites players from the opt-in pool in waves through the test, and there is no way to improve your odds or know when a wave goes out. The guaranteed way is to buy one of the larger upgrade packs, which add beta access to everything else they include.

The Heroic Pack is the trap in that table. It is the cheapest pack, and it does unlock the Skyborne race and early name reservation, but it does not include the beta. Once an account has access, the beta appears as its own entry in the game-version menu for World of Warcraft in the Battle.net app, and installs like any other test client.

With three weeks left, whether to pay for access is a real question. The upgrade packs are worth buying for what they keep after launch: the Skyborne race, the Zephras Isle start and name reservation. Paying the difference between the Heroic and Epic packs only to play a capped test for a fortnight is harder to argue for.

The level 20 phase covered the starting experience: the Skyborne race and their starting zone, Zephras Isle, every zone up to level 20, and the first two new dungeons, Hall of Thanes (13–18) and Ruins of Lordaeron (15–20). The level 30 phase that began on 1 October opens the next band of zones and two more new dungeons: Excavation Site: Wetlands (24–29) and City of Dalaran (28–33), though only the first part of Dalaran's range is reachable at a cap of 30.

• New race: the Skyborne, playable on both factions, from Zephras Isle
• New class and race combinations, all six of them, from level 1
• Four of the nine new dungeons: Hall of Thanes, Ruins of Lordaeron, Excavation Site: Wetlands and City of Dalaran
• The Legacy System's challenge list, which is how the raid boss names became public

Nothing above level 30 is reachable, which rules out the other five new dungeons and everything at the level cap. There is no raid testing at all: the first raid wave on 9 December 2026 launches untested in public.

The beta is the reason a good deal of the pre-launch guesswork has gone. It settled the full list of class and race combinations, the Skyborne's classes and racials, the locations of all nine new dungeons, and the profession cap of 300. It also exposed the change most likely to shape how people level: Forever cut the experience from killing dungeon mobs and raised the experience from dungeon quests, so running the same dungeon over and over is no longer a way to level. The guides on this site were rewritten against the beta on 30 September; the dungeons and leveling guides carry the detail.

It has also shown how Blizzard will police names. From 24 September beta characters that broke the naming rules were forced to rename, and some testers whose names were far outside the rules lost access. With two names per character in Forever, that is worth knowing before name reservation opens on 27 October.

Every beta character is deleted when the beta ends. Levels, gold, items, professions, Legacy progress and names all go; at launch everybody starts at level 1, and a name used in the beta reserves nothing. That makes the beta useful for one thing only: learning. Which class you enjoy, which race and faction you want, which professions pair well, which route through the first thirty levels is fastest for you. All of that survives, because it lives in your head rather than on the character.

It also means that paying anyone to level or gear a beta character is money spent on something that will be deleted within weeks. Some sellers offer beta leveling anyway. This marketplace does not list it, for exactly that reason.