The race to level 60 is already over in World of Warcraft: Forever, shortly after the game went live. Team JokerD, led by the streamer JokerD, reached the cap first — and with the game’s first raids not opening until December 9, the fastest characters in Azeroth now have roughly a month to fill.
Team JokerD was the first team of characters to hit level 60, IGN reported, and the roster was built almost entirely from one race: every character was Undead except a single Troll. The team stayed clear of the field for the whole race. When IGN checked, the highest character outside it — Ksuper Worldfirst — was still level 53, seven levels short of the cap.
Cannibalize carried the sprint to 60
Blizzard changed the Cannibalize ability so it regenerates mana as well, which left little to no downtime between massive pulls, IGN reported. The method the runners used was blunt: gather entire groups of enemies, then burn them down with area-of-effect abilities — a pattern IGN’s Jackie Thomas said she watched play out across the team’s streams.
JokerD has form here. He was the world’s first player to reach level 60 when World of Warcraft Classic launched in 2019, so his team leading the pack in Forever surprised few people — even though, as IGN noted, there was plenty of competition this time around.
Forever opened November 4 — permanent, and priced in tiers
The game the team just broke went live globally on November 4, 2026. Announced at BlizzCon 2026 in September and built by the WoW Classic team, Forever is what fans spent years calling “Classic Plus”: the original Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor at the level 60 cap, layered with more than 1,000 new quests, nine new dungeons, the new Skyborne race and a new battleground. It comes included with an active World of Warcraft subscription, so existing players pay nothing extra to log in, Videogamer reported.
Producer Clayton Stone tied the design back to the Season of Discovery experiments: We knew we could do a permanent version of that,
he told Screen Rant, according to Videogamer. Unlike Classic, Forever won’t march through the old expansions — G2A’s beginner guide notes Blizzard has already said more raids, dungeons, PvP updates, quests and Hardcore will follow while the cap stays at 60.
The Skyborne Heroic Pack will set you back $29.99, the Skyborne Epic Pack $59.99, and the Warcraft Forever Collection — which throws in Warcraft III: Reforged — $79.99. Buyers of the two pricier editions got into a beta that ran from September 17 to October 21, and every edition included early name reservation from October 27 through November 3.
Controller support shipped on day one too, as an official Gamepad (Alpha) option switched on with a single checkbox in the Options menu. In a hands-on for Xbox Wire, editor Mike Nelson wrote:
I haven’t found anything that I can’t access through just the controller, and that’s a good thing for this feature’s future support
Mike Nelson, Xbox Wire editor
Nelson got it running on an ROG Xbox Ally through Battle.net, though handheld play isn’t officially supported yet. Associate game director Paul Kubit told Screen Rant: Official out-of-the-box support is something we’re super excited to add in Forever.
On whether a controller ever reaches retail World of Warcraft, his answer, as Videogamer relayed it, is never say never
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Raids open December 9 — a month after the cap fell
Speaking to IGN, principal game designer Kris Zierhut said Blizzard expects players to run several characters through the leveling process, and stressed that leveling forms a central pillar of the game. The account-wide Legacy System backs that up: Legacy Challenges spanning character progression, professions, PvP, dungeons and raids, and exploration earn Legacy Points that unlock perks and account-wide rewards, with the first point typically coming from hitting level 25, reaching skill 150 in a non-gathering profession, or exploring the full world map.
The launch itself, at least, ran smoothly — largely free of major server problems, IGN reported, before noting that Blizzard later said the game was running on more than 200TB of RAM. For the players who capped out this weekend, though, the near-term menu is short. The first raids don’t open until December 9, 2026:
- Barrow Deeps: level 60, 10 players, eight bosses
- Hyjal Summit: level 60, 20 players, 13 bosses
- Onyxia’s Lair: level 60, 40 players
Earlier coverage: World of Warcraft: Forever Launch Exceeds Expectations With Smooth Release
