World of Warcraft Forever is all about taking your time and exploring the world, rather than rushing to the endgame. But, despite the Forever team’s insistence on taking your time and making friends, a WoW Forever player has already hit level 60.
Team JokerD, led by the eponymous streamer was the first team of characters to hit level 60, and the team was made up entirely of Undead characters and one Troll. The Undead race was important there, because Blizzard changed the Cannibalize ability to help you regenerate mana, which meant there was little to no downtime between massive pulls. I spent some time watching the streams of these speedrunners, and they’d gather entire groups of mobs to nuke them down with AoE abilities.
JokerD’s claim to fame was being the world’s first level 60 when World of Warcraft Classic launched back in 2019, so it’s not super suprising that his team was the first to hit max level in Forever. There was plenty of competition this time around, but JokerD’s team was pretty far ahead of the fray throughout the entire race. Even at the time of writing, the second place character who’s not part of JokerD’s team is Ksuper Worldfirst, who is still level 53.
However, while it’s cool that these players have been able to hit max level already, there’s not much of a reason to rush to endgame right now. The first raids, Barrow Deeps, Hyjal Summit and Onyxia’s Lair, don’t open until December 9, so players hitting level cap this weekend might find it hard to find what they should do next.
When I interviewed WoW Forever principal game designer Kris Zierhut, he made it pretty clear that Blizzard intends players to level multiple characters, and reinforced that leveling is a major part of the game. So, if you do manage to make it to level 60 super early and you run out of content before raids open, it might be worth it to start another character and take a different path to max level.
WoW Forever also had an extremely smooth launch, and was largely free of any major server problems. But, then again, Blizzard later came out and bragged that the game was running on more than 200TB of RAM, so it’d be a little concerning if the servers still buckled under the weight of players trying to log in.