WoW Forever’s First Level 60 and the Race to the Cap

World of Warcraft Forever is focused on slowing down and wandering through the realm, rather than sprinting toward the final game stage. Yet, despite the Forever crew’s message about pacing yourself and meeting others, one WoW Forever player has already reached level 60.

Team JokerD, led by the streamer of the same name, was the first group of characters to reach level 60, and the lineup consisted entirely of Undead characters plus one Troll. The Undead choice mattered because Blizzard altered the Cannibalize skill to restore mana, which left little to no pause between huge pulls. I watched parts of these fast-paced runs, and they would gather huge packs of enemies to take them down with area attacks.

JokerD’s claim to fame was becoming the world’s first level 60 when World of Warcraft Classic arrived in 2019, so it is not very surprising that his group was first to reach the level cap in Forever. There was strong competition this time, but JokerD’s group stayed well ahead during the whole race. Even now, the runner-up character outside JokerD’s team is Ksuper Worldfirst, who remains level 53.

Still, while it is impressive that these players have already reached max level, there is not much reason to hurry toward endgame content right after that. The initial assaults, Barrow Deeps, Hyjal Summit, and Onyxia’s Lair, will not open until December 9, so players who hit the cap this weekend may struggle to decide what comes next.

When I spoke with WoW Forever principal game designer Kris Zierhut, he made it clear that Blizzard wants players to level several characters, and he emphasized that leveling is a central part of the game. So if you reach level 60 very early and run out of activities before raids arrive, it may be smart to begin another character and follow a different route to the cap.

WoW Forever also launched very smoothly, and was mostly free of any major server issues. Still, Blizzard later said the game was operating on more than 200TB of RAM, so it would have been worrying if the servers had struggled under the load of players trying to log in.

Jackie Thomas serves as the Senior Tech an IGN editor and a reigning authority on PC components, she has spent over ten years writing about gaming hardware for IGN, TechRadar, Gizmodo, PC Gamer and more. You can follow her @Jackiecobra.