3 Raids Open on 9 December
Levelling spending is one-off: you buy bags, riding and a trainer fee once and stop thinking about them. A raid week is not like that. This is what the opening of 3 raids on 9 December adds to a Forever wallet, which markets it pulls on, and which parts of the schedule we cannot yet describe.
The spending changes shape, not just size
Until 9 December the money question on a Forever character points one way. Coin earned goes into getting ready: bags, the first riding tier, a weapon that stops being an apology, the trainer fees attached to a crafting slot. Those are one-off purchases. A character buys them once and then stops thinking about them. Raid day replaces that pattern with a repeating one, where roughly the same shopping list is bought again every lockout for as long as the group keeps turning up on the same evening.
That is a different shape of spending, and it is why a purse that felt comfortable while levelling can feel thin in the first weeks afterwards. A one-off purchase can be postponed until the gold is there. A consumable bought for a raid night cannot, because the night happens whether or not the stack was bought. The pressure is rhythmic rather than larger, and it lands on the same handful of markets on the same day each week. The part of it that never comes back is set out in coin that leaves the economy.
None of this is paid out of a publisher-side supply. With no Token, every coin spent on a raid night was farmed by a player, and the demand that opens on 9 December lands on the same listings a crafter and a leveller already use. That is the basic reading behind a market with no Token in it, and raid week is the first moment it is tested by a large group of players buying the same things at once.
3 raids at once concentrate demand
Raids opening together rather than in sequence matters more than the count does. A staggered release would spread buying across several weeks and give suppliers time to restock between them. Everything landing on one date means the first raid week is the narrowest point in the calendar: a lot of characters want the same consumables, the same enchants and the same repair money within a few days of each other. What that does to listings is the subject of who is actually stocking the auction house when demand arrives in a block.
The supply side does not switch over instantly. Gatherers and crafters who spent weeks serving levelling characters have routes, stock and prices built around that customer. Some of them will move to raid materials quickly and some will not move at all, which is the part of the trades that supply raid nights worth watching in the first lockouts. Fresh raid gear also arrives with empty slots on it, and enchants applied to new drops are bought by the same players in the same week.
One thing that does not happen here is gold circulating back out of the raid. With gold-pot runs off the table, loot is settled inside the group rather than paid for, so a raid night is a pure outflow for everyone in it. How the group divides drops instead is the question behind need, greed and soft reserve, and it decides who ends the week needing to buy a replacement at all.
Budget by the week, not by the evening
The useful unit after 9 December is the lockout, not the session. A character who can afford one raid night and nothing else is not funded; a character who can cover the same night repeatedly is. That means working out the recurring half of the list first, which is what the weekly consumable bill covers, and treating anything left over as the part that buys gear or progress rather than attendance.
Two smaller lines sit underneath it and are easy to forget until they arrive together. Repair costs rise with the gear on the character and with how the first attempts on a new boss go, and what repeated wipes cost is the charge nobody budgets in advance. A raid slot also tends to pull a build in a specific direction, so a talent reset charge shows up in the same week for anyone who levelled on a different spec.
The practical version is a buffer rather than a target. Hold enough to cover 2 full weeks of the recurring list before spending anything on gear, so a bad week of farming does not turn into a missed raid. Everything above that buffer can go into the one-off purchases, and if the buffer is never touched, it has still done its job.
What we cannot tell you yet
We do not have raid names, an order, or confirmation of how the 3 raids are meant to be approached, and we are not going to invent one. Whether all of them are open to a fresh group in the first week, whether any of them gate entry behind a quest chain, and what such a chain would cost in materials or travel are all open questions at the time of writing. If a chain turns out to be expensive, it moves money into the week before 9 December rather than after it, and that is a different plan entirely.
We also publish no gold-per-hour figures and no prices on this site, so nothing here tells you how many evenings the buffer takes to build. That depends on the route, the professions on the character and how much of the evening is spent travelling. When the schedule and the entry requirements are written down somewhere official, we will update this with the parts that change the budget and say plainly which parts were guesses.
Questions
Should I stop levelling and start saving before 9 December?
Only if the character is already close to raid-ready. Gold saved by a character that cannot attend is gold sitting idle, while levelling still converts time into both progress and income. The useful switch is at the point where the remaining one-off purchases are done and the next thing to buy is a repeating weekly list.
Does the levelling market disappear once raids open?
No, but it stops being the only customer. New characters and alts keep arriving after 9 December, so low-bracket materials still sell. What changes is that a second set of buyers appears with a narrower list and a weekly rhythm, and suppliers who can serve both tend to have the steadier income.
How much should the raid buffer be?
We do not publish figures, because the answer depends on the class, the group's consumable rules and how many wipes a new boss takes. The method is better than a number: track what one full raid week actually takes out of your purse, then hold twice that before spending on anything else.
Do 3 raids mean 3 times the weekly cost?
Not necessarily, and we have no basis to claim it. Some spending scales with the number of nights played, such as consumables and repairs, while other lines are paid once regardless, such as a talent reset. Until the lockout structure is confirmed, treat per-raid scaling as an assumption rather than a fact.
Sources
- Blizzard's official site, where release dates and patch notes for Forever are posted — World of Warcraft news.