WoW Forever release date, beta and the raid calendar

World of Warcraft: Forever launches on 4 November 2026 at 3:00 PM PST. It is included with a normal World of Warcraft subscription — there is no separate purchase and no separate client fee — which is the single most consequential detail for anyone deciding whether to be there on day one. The beta opened on 17 September 2026 and runs until late October, which is why concrete impressions of the first thirty levels have started appearing from players rather than only from Blizzard.

The gap between launch and the first raid lockout is thirty-five days. That number does more work than any other in planning terms: it is the entire runway from a fresh character to a raid seat, and it is why demand for levelling and pre-raid gearing services is concentrated into November rather than spread across the winter.

The beta is a test of the early game, not of the whole one. Characters were capped at level 20 when it opened and the cap rises to 30 partway through; there is no raid testing, nothing above level 30 is reachable, and every beta character is deleted when it ends. Getting in is either a free opt-in on Battle.net, which is a lottery, or guaranteed with one of the larger packs.

Two things in that table are easy to miss. The new race is not part of the subscription: playing a Skyborne needs at least the Heroic Pack. And name reservation, from 27 October to 3 November, is a pack benefit too — Forever has no realms, so a name is unique across a whole region and the early window matters more than it would on a server list. None of the packs includes a level boost: Blizzard has said Forever launches with no paid character boost and no WoW Token.

Forever ships with a permanent level cap of 60 and no expansion behind it. There is no flying and no level scaling. The game is realmless: instead of picking a server you pick a ruleset — Normal, PvP or Roleplaying, with Hardcore arriving after launch on a date Blizzard has not announced.

• Nine new dungeons spread across the whole climb, from Hall of Thanes at 13–18 to The Shaper's Terrace at 58–60
• New zones: Zephras Isle, The Riverglades, Mount Hyjal and Shen'dralas
• A new playable race, the Skyborne, starting on Zephras Isle and sold with the upgrade packs
• Six new class and race combinations: Dwarf Shaman, Undead Paladin, Gnome Priest, Human Hunter, Orc Mage and Troll Warlock
• Camping, a new system in which professions craft campsite objects that grant buffs and rested experience
• The Legacy System: account-wide progression with 65 points earnable at launch and 16 spendable per character
• A 14-rank PvP honour track and the new Darkspear Islands 15v15 battleground
• An optional transmog system

The first raid wave lands on 9 December 2026 and contains three instances at three sizes: The Barrow Deeps at ten players, Hyjal Summit at twenty, and Onyxia's Lair at forty, returning from Classic. The boss names are known, because the beta's Legacy Challenge list names them — eight encounters in The Barrow Deeps, thirteen in Hyjal Summit — but the beta tests no raids, so mechanics, loot rules and lockout timers are all still unpublished.

If raiding on 9 December is the goal, the practical sequence is a character at 60 by late November and pre-raid gearing in the two weeks after that. Booked services on this site are scheduled against that calendar rather than sold as durations, which is why the advice on every commercial page here is to agree a finish date rather than a number of days.

If it is not the goal, the runway matters less than the ruleset. Forever's realmless design means the ruleset choice is the one decision that follows a character permanently, and with a cap of 60 and no expansion treadmill, there is no later point at which an early mistake stops mattering.