The Forever Launch Checklist

Updated September 18, 2026Beta ends and launch lands November 4, 2026

The dates

The October 27 window, in more detail. Reservation is open to accounts holding a Hero Pack or another Forever upgrade, and it runs until November 3. The part causing most of the confusion is that there is no separate reservation site to log into: it happens in the game client itself, and it does not create a character. You claim the first and last name pair and stop there; the rest of the setup waits for launch day. Players looking for a web portal in the days before the 27th were looking for something that was never announced.

Because nothing is created that week, the reservation hands you names and nothing else — no starting gold, no professions chosen, no position in a starting zone. Blizzard has not published an opening hour for the 27th, so treat it as an early job rather than an evening one, and keep the rest of the preparation, including the gold plan by level bracket, on its own schedule.

The hours are now published. Blizzard has since given the opening times for the window, so the early-job advice above can be pinned to a clock. The beta closed on 23 October. Name reservation and ruleset selection open on 27 October at 18:00 CET for EU and 13:00 PDT for NA, and on 28 October at 07:00 KST for KR and 07:00 CST for TW. The window stays open until 3 November, and the servers open on 4 November.

What the window is attached to. Reservation access comes with a paid purchase rather than with a plain subscription. The packs that carry it are the Skyborne Heroic pack, the Skyborne Epic pack and the Warcraft Forever Collection; an account without one of those claims its names when the servers open on 4 November instead. The opening hours taken from the forum post are 27 October at 18:00 CET for EU and 13:00 PDT for NA, then 28 October at 07:00 KST for KR and 07:00 CST for TW, and the window stays open through 3 November for all of them.

The 30 days of game time. The question that comes up alongside the packs is what the entry actually costs on top of a subscription that is already running. The upgrade carries 30 days of game time with it, and the answer given in the thread is that those 30 days are appended to the end of the current subscription rather than running in parallel with it, so an account that is already paid up for the month does not lose that month by claiming them. Nothing further has been published on how the two are stacked, so treat the ordering as the one stated in the reply and not as a documented rule.

For planning purposes that makes the game time a part of the purchase rather than a reason to let a subscription lapse before launch. An account that is paid through the opening week keeps that period intact, with the 30 days starting when it would otherwise have run out — which also means there is no timing trick worth arranging around the window on 27 October.

3 characters, counted across every ruleset. The cap on the window is 3 reserved names for the account in total, not 3 on each ruleset. A name held on one ruleset and a name held on another both come out of the same allowance, so the split between rulesets has to be decided before you start claiming rather than after. The claim itself happens inside the Forever client, with no separate web portal, and it holds the first and last name pair without creating the character — race, class and professions are all picked on the day the servers open.

The opening has since been pushed back. Blizzard has postponed the start over technical problems and has not published a replacement date, so the reservation window keeps the hours and the order described above while the launch itself is open-ended. Until a new date is given there is nothing to plan the first hour around, which leaves the parts of the preparation that do not depend on a clock — the ruleset choice, the name list, the profession pairing and the gold plan by level bracket — as the ones worth finishing now.

The hour that was attached to 4 November. Before the postponement, the opening was set for midnight at the turn from 4 to 5 November across most of Europe — 00:00 local time on the night between the two dates — which is 02:00 on 5 November in Moscow. That is worth keeping in mind even while the date is open-ended, because it was a late-night start rather than an evening one for European players, and a very early morning for anyone further east. Whether a replacement date keeps the same hour has not been stated.

The reason the hour matters more than usual is what happens in the first hours of a fresh economy. Gathering nodes in the starting zones are taken by whoever is logged in at the opening, the first auction listings set the reference points that later sellers price against, and the early profession materials move before most of the server has finished choosing a class. A player who logs in several hours after the doors open is not locked out of any of that, but is working against a market that already has sellers in it. If the start lands on the same clock again, decide in advance whether you are playing the opening hours or sleeping through them, since the two plans want different first days.

The maintenance window before the doors open. The last night in the run-up is not playable. Maintenance runs from 21:00 Moscow time on 4 November to 02:00 Moscow time on 5 November, and the servers open at 02:00 Moscow time on 5 November, at the end of that window. Name reservation closes earlier and separately, on 3 November, so anything still undecided about names has to be settled before the maintenance starts rather than during it.

In practice that means the evening of 4 November is for preparation and not for play: addons installed, ruleset chosen, the race and class pairing settled, and the first route out of the starting zone picked. Plan the first farming session from 02:00 onward rather than from the evening, and if you are not playing the opening hours, treat the plan as a normal first day instead — the gold plan by level bracket does not depend on being online at the opening.

Two things reported by players sit outside that schedule. Some describe getting into the reservation flow before the published hour for their region, which is worth knowing if you intend to be at the client early anyway, though nothing about it has been confirmed as intended. Separately, players on Oceanic realms report that the reservation is not reachable for them at all; Blizzard has not published a note on it, so there is no stated hour or workaround to plan around — only the fallback of claiming names at launch.

How the window actually opened. The start did not line up with the published hour. Players waiting on the client at the stated time report that the reservation flow was not live yet and came up later, with no running commentary while it was down. Once it did open, the usual opening-hour behaviour followed: queues on the way in, disconnects part-way through the claim, and attempts that had to be repeated before a name stuck. None of that changes the shape of the window — it still runs through 3 November — but it does mean the first minutes were not a reliable time to claim, and anyone who gave up early still has the rest of the window to work with.

The US opening is an evening slot. The start for the US is given as an evening time in Eastern time rather than a morning one, which moves the whole first session later in the day for North American players and into the small hours for anyone playing from Europe on a US realm. That matters for the checklist below, because every item written as something to do in the first hours assumes you are actually in the world at the opening and not sitting in a queue behind it.

Two things are worth planning around. The first is the queue itself: opening-hour waits were the normal experience during the reservation window, and nothing published suggests the launch will behave differently, so the time between clicking enter world and standing in a starting zone is not a fixed quantity. The second is unplanned downtime — players are treating an emergency restart in the opening evening as likely rather than unexpected, though Blizzard has not said anything about one. Taken together, the realistic version of launch night is a late and interrupted first session, so the early tasks that depend on being first — a quiet node route, an uncontested quest chain, a profession trainer without a crowd — should be ordered by what survives being pushed back an hour or two. The rest, including the gold plan by level bracket, keeps just as well the next day.

Names carried over from the beta. A recurring complaint is that names used on the beta were reported as taken when players tried to claim them. The beta characters themselves were wiped, so a name held there carries no standing into the live realms, and Blizzard has not published anything on how reserved names interact with beta records. Whatever the cause, the practical answer is the same: go into the window with a list rather than a single preferred name, and decide the ruleset split first, since all 3 claims come out of one allowance for the account.

Two things follow from that. The regional times are not a staggered release of separate pools — they are the local opening of the same window, so if you play on a realm outside your own region, work from the hour for that region rather than your own. And the gap between the close of reservation on 3 November and launch on 4 November is short, which is why the ruleset decision belongs in the first hours of the window rather than at the end of it: a name held on the wrong realm cannot be moved across before the servers open.

4 November is not 4 November everywhere. The dates on this page are written the way Blizzard publishes them, and players in New Zealand and Australia point out in the same threads that the conversion lands them on 5 November in local time. Nothing about the opening is delayed for them — it is one moment on one clock, shared by every region — but the calendar date on their side is the next one, and plans made around a date rather than an hour come out wrong by a full day. The same shift applies to the reservation window and to its close before launch.

The practical effect is on when the work starts rather than on what it is. If your evening falls on the far side of the date line, the first hours of levelling, the first gathering runs and the first auction listings happen while the bulk of the EU and NA population is somewhere else in its own day, which changes what is already on the auction house when you get there and what is still unsold. It is worth converting the published hour into your own time once, writing that down, and building the gold plan by level bracket around that figure rather than around the date in the announcement.

There is still no official change list. As of 31 October, the patch notes shown for Forever in the Battle.net launcher are the classic notes rather than notes written for this release, and Blizzard has not published a separate changelog anywhere else. That means the launcher entry is not a usable reference for what is different: anyone reading it is reading an older document that happens to sit in the Forever slot.

Everything circulating about mechanical changes therefore comes from datamining the client and from beta reports, not from a published list. That is worth keeping in mind when planning professions, the ruleset split or the first levelling route — datamined values can be placeholders, can be changed before the servers open, and can be read wrongly in the first place. Treat the detail as provisional until Blizzard publishes notes of its own, and leave room in the plan for parts of it to be wrong.

The question people are actually searching for. Most of the traffic around the opening is one question asked in a dozen ways: what time does it start in my region. The honest answer is that only part of it has been published. The reservation window has stated hours, and they are the ones quoted above: 27 October at 18:00 CET for EU and 13:00 PDT for NA, then 28 October at 07:00 KST for KR and 07:00 CST for TW, open through 3 November. The server opening is a different matter. After the postponement there is no replacement date and therefore no regional clock for it, so any hour circulating for the first login is not coming from Blizzard. When a new date is given, expect the same pattern: one global moment stated in local time per region, not separate openings.

That distinction matters for the first 24 hours of the auction house. The early market is thin and unsettled regardless of region, and the people who do well in it are the ones already gathering and listing while everyone else is still deciding on a profession pair. Since the clock is unknown, the preparation that pays off is the part that does not need one: the ruleset split, the name list, the profession pairing and the gold plan by level bracket you intend to run from level 1.

The global opening hour. The launch itself was given as a single worldwide moment rather than a staggered regional rollout: 4 November at 3pm PST. Blizzard's own wording is the short form — Goes Live Globally November 4 — and the conversions into other zones were worked out by players in the announcement thread, not published alongside it. That matters for anyone east of the date line, where 3pm PST on 4 November already falls on the morning of 5 November: Oceanic players are logging in on a different calendar day than the one in the headline, even though it is the same opening.

Two practical consequences. First, a converted time taken from a forum reply is only as good as the person who did the arithmetic, so check it against your own clock before you build an evening around it. Second, the first hours of a shared global opening are when the early market is thinnest and most erratic, which is a reason to have the gold plan by level bracket settled before you log in rather than during the queue. As noted above, the start has since been postponed without a replacement date, so the 3pm PST hour describes the original schedule rather than a confirmed one.

The opening hour, by region. The official overview gives the start as a single global moment rather than a staggered rollout. In the Americas it lands on 4 November at 15:00 PST, in Brazil on 4 November at 20:00 BRT, in the United Kingdom on 4 November at 23:00 GMT, which is 23:00 UTC. The same moment falls on 5 November in Europe, Taiwan, Korea and ANZ, so players in those regions should plan the evening of the 4th as a wait and the 5th as the day they actually log in.

That matters for the first hour of the economy more than for anything else. Every realm starts from zero at the same instant, so the early vendor runs, the first herbs and ores pulled out of the starting zones and the first auction listings all appear within the same window regardless of where the player sits. If you intend to be in that window, set the alarm against the hour for the realm you are rolling on rather than the one for the country you live in, and have the ruleset, the profession pairing and the gold plan by level bracket settled beforehand, since none of those decisions are worth making while the queue is moving.

Where the levels sit on the new map. The opening is set for 4 November at 15:00 PDT, and 2 of the 4 new zones have published level bands worth planning around. Zephras Isle is a starting zone, covering levels 1 to 12, so it is where Skyborne characters and the new race–class combinations begin rather than anywhere gold accumulates. Riverglades sits much further along: it carries 150+ quests built for the middle 30s through the middle 40s, which makes it the first new area where quest rewards arrive in volume.

That split matters for the first weeks. The early hours after the servers open are spent in a bracket that pays almost nothing, so the money question only becomes real once characters reach the 30s and Riverglades opens up as a block of quest income rather than a scatter of single turn-ins. Professions picked on day one are worth matching to that route, since gathering done while clearing a dense quest zone costs no extra time. The rest of the bracket-by-bracket reasoning is in the gold plan by level bracket.

The launch itself is not staggered. The regional hours apply to the reservation window only; on 4 November everyone holding a character on a realm logs in at the same moment. That is what produces the pictures of packed starting zones that come round every launch, and it has a direct effect on the first day of the economy. Herb and ore nodes in the opening zones are contested by the whole realm at once, respawns are stripped as fast as they appear, and the early auction house is both thin and erratic — a few people list, most are still gathering, and the first quotes say more about who got to the node than about what anything is worth. The listings only start to mean something once the crowd spreads out across the 4 zones.

The suggestion that comes up in every launch thread is to split the entry — open by timezone, or let pack holders in ahead of everyone else. Blizzard has not announced anything of the sort for Forever, and the published schedule has one opening for all of it, so it is worth planning around the crush rather than around a fix that may never arrive. In practice that means not treating the first hours as gathering time: level through the congestion, pick up the professions, and start the gold plan by level bracket once the starting zones have emptied and the auction house has enough listings to read.

What the first hours look like, by player account. Three things come up in every report from a launch of this kind. The first is the login queue: everyone arrives at the same minute, and the wait to get onto a busy realm can take a sizeable part of the evening, which is the main argument for picking a quieter realm during the reservation window rather than following the crowd. The second is the fight over tags in the opening zones — the first few quests send the whole realm at the same handful of mobs, and kills are taken out from under you faster than they respawn. Grouping up is the usual answer, since shared credit beats racing strangers for the same spawn. The third is that the crush thins out on its own: once people spread across the 4 zones and the fast levellers move ahead, the starting areas empty within the first day.

Layering is the part that sets how long the crush lasts. Players coming out of the beta report that new characters are held on a single layer for the opening levels and are only sorted across layers at roughly level 4, which keeps the very first quest hubs packed and then releases the pressure once people clear them. Blizzard has not published the exact rule, so treat the level as the number players have observed rather than a stated one. For the economy it means the same thing either way: gathering in the opening zones is not worth the time while everyone is still standing on top of each other, and the auction house only becomes readable once that has sorted itself out.

Reaching 60 early is a trading position, not just a head start. The players who cap first are selling into a market where most of the realm is still levelling, and the things that crowd will need — weapon oils, bandages, potions, bags, leg and bracer enchants, the mid-level crafted gear that covers the gaps between dungeon drops — are cheap to assemble while everyone else is still gathering for their own levelling. A stockpile built during that stretch is held against demand that arrives later: the bulk of the realm hitting 60, then the raids on December 9, when Barrow Deeps, Hyjal Summit and Onyxia's Lair all open at once and consumable demand stops being a trickle. Storage is the limit, so the sensible version of this is a short list of items you can actually move rather than a bank full of everything.

Expect the first weeks to read badly. Early prices swing because both sides of the market are thin and neither is stable: supply comes from levelling players selling whatever they happened to pick up, demand is scattered across every bracket at once, and a single stack listed by one person can set the visible price for an item nobody is really trading. Materials that look expensive one evening collapse when a few gatherers reach the zone that drops them, and quiet items jump the week a recipe becomes common. Treat quotes from the opening weeks as a snapshot rather than a baseline, check the same items across several days before deciding what something is worth, and keep the stockpile to goods whose demand you can name — those settle into a readable pattern sooner than the rest.

Three fixed points are left before launch. The beta closed on 23 October, and nothing from it carries over — characters, gold and progress all went with it. On 27 October the window opens for character creation itself rather than a bare name claim: ruleset, realm and name are chosen together, and the character exists from that moment instead of being assembled on launch morning. That supersedes the earlier reading further up, where the window was described as a name reservation with no character behind it.

The run-up in 3 dates. The first is 27 October, when the reservation window opens — 13:00 PDT for North America, with the other regional hours listed above. The second is 2 November, when a poster signing is scheduled ahead of release; it is an event around the launch rather than a game milestone, so it changes nothing about realms, names or the queue. The third is 4 November, when the servers open. Nothing between the close of the window on 3 November and the opening on 4 November requires anything from you in the client.

Worth keeping the 2 of them apart when reading launch threads. The 27 October hour is the one with a consequence attached: a name and ruleset claimed late is a name and ruleset claimed on whatever is left, and the choice cannot be moved before the servers open. The signing on 2 November has no equivalent deadline behind it, and anyone who misses it starts 4 November in exactly the same position as anyone who did not. Plan the week around the window, not around the event.

The days between 27 October and 4 November are given over to finishing work on the service rather than to new content. Blizzard has not published a list of what is being adjusted in that stretch, so the practical response is narrow: expect client patches in the week before the servers open, start the download early rather than on the morning of the 4th, and treat nothing from the beta build as final. None of that changes the order of the preparation — ruleset, then the characters, then the gold plan by level bracket once you know which realm's auction house you will actually be buying on.

The ruleset is picked at reservation, not at launch. Claiming a name means claiming it on a specific realm, and the realm list on October 27 includes an RP-PvP ruleset alongside the usual ones. That makes the name window the point where the choice is actually made: you can still start a second character elsewhere on November 4, but the names you hold stay where you claimed them, and so does the group of people you agreed to play with. It is worth settling the ruleset question with your guild before the 27th rather than during it, because the window is shared and the obvious names go first.

The 30 days of game time are not counted the same way. The physical collector's edition and the digital editions both include 30 days, but they start at different moments. The physical edition's code begins spending that time as soon as it is entered, whatever day that happens to be. The digital editions do not start counting until 5 November, the release day, so the time sits unused until then. For anyone returning after a break, that difference decides whether the included month covers the first weeks of play or whether part of it is used up before the servers are open at all.

The part that costs real money is that it cannot be paused once it has begun. Players who entered a physical code early were told by support to stay out of the game for a month so the purchase could still be refunded, which is less a fix than a way of not making it worse. If you are holding a physical copy and launch is still ahead, there is nothing gained by entering the code before 4 November. If the code is already in, work out how much of the included month is left before deciding what to pay for on top of it, and keep that separate from the gold plan by level bracket, which deals only with in-game income.

The part that matters later is economic. Each realm runs its own auction house, so the ruleset you pick on October 27 decides which market you buy materials on, which one you sell into, and which one you are quoting prices from when you talk to anyone else. RP-PvP realms tend to draw a different and usually smaller crowd than the main PvE ones, which changes what is thin on the auction house and what sits unsold — how the split falls this time is not something anyone can know before the servers open. Either way, the realm decision comes first and the gold making by level bracket follows it, not the other way round.

What has to be ready by December 9, and what does not. Launch day and the first raid night are 35 days apart, and that gap is the whole budget. The things that have to be finished inside it are the ones a raid slot depends on: level 60, the gear that comes out of the 9 dungeons, bag space that lets you carry a full night of consumables, and whichever professions you intend to use for raid supply, because a profession levelled after the fact is of no help on the 9th. Flasks, potions and food fall into the same bracket — not because you need a stockpile, but because the materials for them are bought on a market that has had 5 weeks to form, and the people buying on December 8 are all buying the same list at once.

The items that do not need to beat the date are the expensive conveniences: mounts, cosmetic crafts, bank alt inventory, and anything bought mainly to resell later. None of them affect whether you clear Barrow Deeps, Hyjal Summit or Onyxia's Lair, and all of them keep their value after December. The resistance question sits in between — what the 3 raids actually demand on this ruleset is not something anyone can state before the servers open, so treat resistance pieces as a cost to confirm rather than one to prepay. Sorting the list this way is also the simplest way to keep gold targets by level bracket honest: raid-critical first, everything else when the first clear is behind you.

October 19, the stress test. The step before the name window is a stress test on October 19, run to put load on the servers rather than to show anything new. Blizzard has not published an hour for it, and there is no indication that progress made on it carries anywhere, so treat it as a test session and not as a head start. What it is genuinely useful for is checking your own side of things on the launch build: that the client patches cleanly, that your addons load, that the machine holds up in a crowded starting zone. Finding a broken addon on October 19 costs you an evening; finding it on November 4 costs you the opening hours.

The stress test has moved to October 21. It is no longer on the 19th: the session now opens at 20:00 MSK on October 21. Nothing else about it was changed in the announcement — same purpose, same build, and still no published closing time, so plan around the start rather than the end. In the order of dates it sits between the beta and the name reservation window, and whatever you make on it goes the same way the beta does: the wipe ahead of November 4 leaves nothing on the account.

If you had the addon check pencilled in for the 19th, move it 2 days along with the test. The practical risk with an evening start is the download: the test build may need patching before you can log in at all, so pull it earlier in the day instead of at 20:00. Everything else about the session is unchanged — it is a load test, not a head start, and the only thing worth carrying out of it is the knowledge that your client, your addons and your machine behave on the launch build.

Who can log into the 21st, and when the beta stops. The stress test is not tied to a pack or to an active subscription: any account can get in, which is the point of a load test. That also makes it the cheapest way to check the launch build on your own machine before the name window opens. The beta itself closes on October 23, 2 days after the test, and the wipe that follows takes characters, gold and bags with it. Anything sitting on a beta character on the 23rd is worth exactly nothing on November 4, so there is no reason to bank materials there.

The run-up in one list. The same 4 dates keep getting mixed up in chat, so here they are in order, with what actually changes on each:

• October 21, 20:00 MSK — stress test on the launch build. Open to any account, no pack and no active subscription needed. Nothing made on it carries over; no closing time was published.
• October 23 — the beta stops. The wipe that follows removes characters, gold and bags, so nothing stored on a beta character is worth keeping.
• October 27 to November 3 — name reservation for accounts holding a Hero Pack or another Forever upgrade. Up to 3 first and last name pairs, claimed in the game client, no character created and no opening hour published.
• November 4 — launch. Fresh characters for everyone, 4 zones, 9 dungeons, level 60 cap, and the first auction house starts from nothing.
• December 9 — Barrow Deeps, Hyjal Summit and Onyxia's Lair open together on a weekly lockout.

What matters across all of it is that nothing carries forward from before November 4. Reservation hands you names, the stress test hands you a working client, and the beta hands you nothing at all once it closes — so the only preparation that survives is the plan itself, which is why it is worth having the gold making routes by level bracket picked out before the servers open rather than after. If Blizzard announces anything else for the run-up, such as a trial period, it has not been published at the time of writing.

What the test showed about crowding. The large guilds and the streamer rosters did not spread out on the 21st — they agreed on one point, arrived together and stayed there, and the zone around them stopped behaving: mobs slow to appear, loot and quest objects lagging behind the click, movement stuttering for everyone in range. That is the result a load test is meant to produce, so it says nothing about how the servers will hold on a normal evening. It does say something about where those groups go when they all start at once, and the same rosters will be on the starting routes on November 4 rather than scattered across the map.

Plan the first day around that density instead of against it. The obvious opening quests and the named spawns on the main road are where the queue forms, so the early hours are better spent on gathering loops and on the quieter half of a starting zone, with the contested objectives picked up once the first wave has moved on. Nothing is lost by levelling slightly out of step with everyone else, and the gold making routes by level bracket work the same whether you run them in the crowd or an hour behind it. Trainers, mailboxes and the first auction house are the other pinch points worth timing around rather than walking into.

December 9 sets the horizon. Barrow Deeps, Hyjal Summit and Onyxia's Lair all open on the same day, and they run on a weekly lockout — so the consumable and repair demand they create repeats every reset rather than landing once and fading. For anyone planning income rather than a single sale, that is the date the market starts to look like a schedule: levelling demand first, then a steady weekly cycle from the raid roster. The bracket-by-bracket gold making routes by level hold up either way, but the balance shifts toward consumables once the lockout cycle begins. Blizzard has not published the reset day for Forever, so plan the cycle and confirm the day once it is announced.

What unlocks the 27th. The reservation window runs October 27 to November 3 and is tied to a pre-order — the Skyborne upgrade or the Warcraft Forever Collection, depending on which one you bought. An ordinary subscription is enough to play on launch day; it is not enough to claim names that week. If you intend to reserve, the pre-order needs to be sitting on the account before the 27th rather than ordered that morning, and the 3 first-and-last pairs want deciding in advance, because the window is the only part of the run-up with a hard close on it.

The opening hour is published. The name window starts at 13:00 PDT on October 27, which is 18:00 CET the same day, and stays open until November 3. That takes the guesswork out of the earlier advice to be there first thing: the client will not let anyone claim a name before that hour, so the thing worth doing in the morning is patching and logging in, not waiting at a blank screen. The close on November 3 has no published hour attached to it, so treat the last day as the last day rather than counting on a full evening at the end of it.

The free week, 5 to 11 November. Alongside the paid launch there is an invite-code window: holders of the Heroic pack get 1 code, holders of the Epic pack and of the Warcraft Forever Collection get 3 each, and the codes start going out from 20 October. In Moscow time the servers open at 02:00 MSK on 5 November, which is the same moment as the November 4 opening further west, and the invited accounts run from then until 11 November. If you are handing codes to friends, do it in the days after the 20th rather than on the night itself, since a code claimed late still has to redeem and patch before anyone can log in.

Two things follow from that for the first week. The invited accounts are restricted to the low levels rather than the full game, so the crowd they add sits in the starting zones and on the early quest routes, not in dungeons or on the high-level nodes — Blizzard has not published the exact limit, so plan around the bracket rather than a number. And the wave ends on 11 November, which is when the starting-zone competition for herbs, ore and early quest mobs thins out again. For anyone working the gold making routes by level, the low brackets are the contested ones in that first week, and the quieter money is a bracket or two above where the free accounts stop.

3 names, and what they actually commit you to. The cap for the window is 3 first-and-last pairs on an eligible account. Since the claim does not create a character, the pair holds the text and nothing more: race, class and professions are all still open when you sit down on November 4, and a name you reserve for a tank can end up on a gatherer without anything blocking it. Blizzard has not published what happens to a reserved name that is never used after the window closes, so treat the 3 pairs as a plan rather than a placeholder you can sit on indefinitely.

That makes the 27th a useful point to decide how many characters you are really going to run, because the number tends to decide the earning side too. 1 main means everything comes from whatever that character can gather and sell between quests. 2 means you can put a gathering profession on the second and feed the first. 3 is where people usually split into a main, a dedicated gatherer and a bank or auction alt that never leaves the city. None of that has to be locked in during the reservation week, but deciding it then is cheaper than deciding it on launch night, and the gold routes by level bracket read differently depending on which of the 3 shapes you pick.

3 characters means 3 in total. The limit is counted across all rulesets combined, not per realm and not per ruleset — a name claimed on one does not leave you 3 more elsewhere. If you intend to play both a main and an alt on different rules, the split has to be decided before the window opens rather than halfway through it. Access to the window comes from the Skyborne Heroic or Skyborne Epic upgrade, or from the Warcraft Forever Collection; an ordinary subscription still covers November 4 itself, but it does not open the reservation.

"Nameday", and which pack opened what. In the threads running a week or 2 before the start, players have taken to calling October 27 simply nameday, and the posts asking about it tend to mix up 3 separate things: access to the beta, access to the name window, and access to the game itself. They are not the same purchase. Beta invitations went to the $60 and $80 packs; the $29.99 tier that unlocks the Skyborne race did not carry beta access with it, which is where most of the money gets spent by mistake. Forever itself needs nothing beyond the ordinary subscription on November 4.

So the sensible order is to work out what you actually want before the 27th. If it is the race, the cheaper unlock covers it. If it is the early name claim, you need the Skyborne upgrade or the Warcraft Forever Collection sitting on the account already, since it is tied to a pre-order rather than to a subscription. And if it was the beta you were after, that question closed with the wipe — nothing made there survives to launch day, so buying up now gets you names and a race, not a head start.

How fast the front of the pack actually gets to 60. The question under the timeline is usually who takes the market first, and the only figure circulating before launch is a forum estimate: somewhere between 100 and 200 hours of played time from level 1 to 60, depending on route, class and how much of it is spent grouped. Blizzard has published nothing on levelling pace for Forever, so treat the range as what it is — players on the beta comparing notes, not a measured number. The spread matters more than the midpoint: a 100-hour run and a 200-hour run reach the same cap several days apart, and the early auction house is shaped by whoever arrives in that first window.

The same threads argue that anyone landing well under the low end is not doing it alone, and the two explanations raised are automation and an account passed between several people playing in shifts. Neither is something an outsider can confirm from a levelling ladder, and it is worth saying plainly that this is suspicion rather than evidence. What it does mean for planning is simple: if you are counting on being first to sell into a thin market, do not build the plan around beating the top of the ladder. Build it around being early with supply in the brackets you can reach on your own hours, which is where gold making by level bracket does more work than raw speed.

Before the day

Sort the account, not the character

• An active subscription or game time covering November 4. Forever is included with the ordinary WoW subscription — there is no separate box to buy in order to play it.
• Decide on an upgrade pack, or decide against it. The packs are what unlock early name reservation, and the Skyborne race is reported at $29.99 to unlock. If neither matters to you, the base subscription still gets you in on launch day.
• Pre-download before the 3rd. A 3:00 p.m. launch with a patch still downloading is how people miss the first evening.

Write 9 names, not 3

Names in Forever are 2 parts, a first and a last, and they are unique across the whole region rather than per realm. That is a far larger name space than Classic ever had, so the usual land grab should be gentler — but a reservation slot spent staring at a name generator is a slot wasted. 3 characters, 3 candidate pairs each.

Pick the playstyle before you pick the class

This is the choice people underestimate. Normal, PvP and Roleplay are separate ecosystems inside your region: separate populations, separate markets, no mixing between them. Changing your mind later is not a /whisper away.

• Faction — mail and trade are same-faction only, so it decides who can hand you anything, including anything you buy.
• Class and race — 6 new combinations open at launch, Undead Paladins among them, and the Skyborne can play either faction with slightly different racials on each side.
• Professions — the collected advice from everyone covering the beta agrees here: gathering first. Raw materials sell instantly in week one, while crafted goods are still competing with quest greens and the good recipes sit behind blueprints you have not found yet.

Launch day itself

• Expect layering, not queues. One world per region means the crowd is spread across layers of the same zone rather than parked in a login queue. 2 people in the same spot may not see each other; a party invite pulls you onto the same layer.
• If you rolled Skyborne, Zephras Isle is the starter zone and carries you to about 12.
• Leave the auction house alone on day one. There is nothing in it and the prices are nonsense in both directions.
• Start gathering from the first mob. The Legacy profession tree has a perk worth up to 20% more scarce materials, points are account-wide, and the sooner you earn them the longer they pay.

Plan around the crowd, not around your route. Layering keeps the load off the login screen, but it does not change the fact that everyone is working the same opening quests in the same hours. Named quest mobs get tapped as they spawn, and the herb and ore nodes in the first zones are picked over again within minutes of respawning. Blizzard has not published a population figure for opening week, and nobody else has one worth quoting, so treat it the way previous Classic openings went: the first days run slower than any guide's level times suggest, and a plan that assumes clear spawns will not survive the day.

What the crush means for the first sales. Expect delayed loot, sluggish ability response and the occasional disconnect over the first 24 hours, which makes that window a poor one for anything needing precise timing. Gathering survives it — a node picked on a struggling server is still a node — so the early hours are better spent filling bags than watching an auction house that has nothing in it. The same shortage the crowd creates is what makes raw stacks worth listing once trade starts moving: competition is heaviest around the starter hubs, so moving 1 zone outward usually beats queueing for the nearest vein, and the level-bracket gold plan assumes you will.

The race players actually talk about. On forums and in guild chat the opening weeks get framed the same way every time: sell on the auction house before the real-money trade pushes prices up. The reasoning is straightforward. In the first weeks nobody has a stockpile, every buyer is funding first bags, first mounts and first crafted gear out of quest money, and the amount of gold chasing each stack of ore or cloth is small. As external supply and the general pile of gold on a server grow, the same stack buys the seller less than it did at the start, even when its listed price looks higher.

The practical reading for launch week is that an hour of gathering at the start is not worth the same as an hour of gathering a month later, and the gap runs in favour of the early hour. That is an argument for choosing gathering professions on day one, for banking materials rather than vendoring them, and for listing while the market is still thin instead of waiting for a price that feels right. How long the window lasts is not something anyone can state in advance: Blizzard has published nothing on it, and previous Classic openings varied by realm and by playstyle ruleset. Treat it as weeks rather than months, and plan the early farm accordingly.

The first weeks

The 9 new dungeons are spread across the whole levelling range rather than stacked at the end: Hall of Thanes at 13–18, Ruins of Lordaeron at 15–20, Excavation Site at 24–29, City of Dalaran at 28–33, The Drowned City at 35–40, Krol'Dok Stronghold at 40–45, Alcaz Island Prison at 48–53, then Blackmaw Hold and Shaper's Terrace at the top. Riverglades is built for the mid-30s to mid-40s, and Mount Hyjal is the endgame levelling zone.

Blueprints drop from dungeon bosses, which makes the levelling dungeons profession content as well. A group that runs them on the way up arrives at 60 with recipes nobody who skipped them can buy.

The money question

If you intend to farm it rather than buy it, the gold-making plan lays out what to do in each level bracket. Keep a reserve for riding training and do not commit it to the auction house early. The number is official now: 100 gold for the first tier of riding and 1,000 for the top one, mount included. Blizzard has not said which levels those unlock at, so plan for the money rather than for a date.

At today's rate 1,000 gold is $70.00 if you buy it — which is exactly why most people farm it instead. Worth knowing before you decide which of the two you are doing.

If you intend to buy gold rather than farm it, the arithmetic is not in launch week's favour: supply is at its lowest on November 4 and rises every week after. What creates and destroys gold explains why, and the price tracker shows the market as it actually moves. Note also that Blizzard used the September 17 Q&A to say it will come down harder on gold buyers in Forever than it has before.

3 things not to do

• Do not buy beta gold. It is wiped on November 4 along with the character holding it.
• Do not trust a realm list. Any site still offering you Forever realms is describing a game that was cancelled before it shipped.
• Do not wait for a Token. Blizzard has ruled out both the Token and paid boosts. There is no official way to turn money into Forever gold, and there will not be one.