It’s (re)launch day for WoW Classic, as Blizzard opens the doors this evening to a batch of fresh start megaservers around the globe starting at 5:00 pm eastern. And if you want to call these 20th anniversary servers “WoW Classic Classic,” nobody’s going to stop you – least of all the devs who said it first!
All of these servers — PvE, PvP, and Hardcore — will start all the way back with vanilla and stay there for a little over a year as the game progresses through phases. Eventually, the PvE and PvP servers will move onward to The Burning Crusade (and perhaps more?) in early 2026.
A last-minute push by the community resulted in the addition of an Oceanic PvP server to the realm list as well, bringing up the total to seven new realms (three in NA, three in EU, and one in Australia).
Blizzard instituted several significant quality-of-life improvements for this version of Classic, including a new functional looking-for-group tool, a modern guild UI, the ability to save world buffs, no debuff or buff limits, and the early inclusion of dual specs. The studio also forbade GDKP on these realms and is enforcing faction balance on the PvP servers to avoid lopsided populations.
Here’s the roadmap for the fresh start realms:
And for nostalgia’s sake, here’s the original WoW Classic announcement trailer from back in the day:
