The WoW Forever beta is live: what's playable in week one

The WoW Forever beta opened on Sept 17, straight after Blizzard's developer Q&A, and runs through Oct 21. Players who bought the Skyborne Epic Pack or the Warcraft Forever Collection got in right away. Everyone else who opted in is being invited in waves throughout the test.

Week one is small on purpose. Blizzard's beta post lists the new Skyborne race and their Zephras Isle starting zone, all zone content up to level 20, and two of the new dungeons: Hall of Thanes (13–18) and Ruins of Lordaeron (15–20). The cap is 20 for now and goes up to 30 later, with more zones, more dungeons and the new battleground added as the beta goes on.

Blizzard also plans a Server Slam, a window of a few hours when anyone can log in to the beta. It has no date yet.

Opening night was rough. Login queues and disconnects kept a lot of players out for the first hours. Tom Ellis, a Senior Game Producer on the Classic team, explained afterwards on X that the beta runs on test hardware that was never built for a crowd like this. A system that throttles logins under heavy load was misreading the traffic, the test database was slow to answer queries, which is why looting and accepting quests lagged, and empty maps weren't shutting down properly and ate memory. Once those were fixed, he called the rest of the night "incredibly smooth".

Blizzard's Kaivax keeps a known-issues list on the beta forums. Early entries include barber chairs throwing a Lua error, friends lists being switched off, pet display and scaling problems for Hunters and Warlocks, and the Cooldown Manager still being a work in progress. One practical tip from Warcraft Tavern: the beta loads your retail addons and keybinds, which saves setting up your keys, but switch the retail addons off first or you'll get a stream of Lua errors. Nothing carries over: beta characters are wiped, and everyone starts at level 1 on Nov 4.