WoW Forever Guild Setup — Sign-ups, Roster and Discord

World of Warcraft: Forever is Blizzard's official Classic+, announced at BlizzCon on 12 September 2026. It keeps the level cap at 60 permanently and branches away from vanilla rather than progressing into The Burning Crusade. For guilds, the practical question is not what is in it — it is that a fresh launch compresses recruiting, ruleset choice and roster building into about six weeks.

This guide is about that six weeks. Everything below is either true of guild organisation generally or drawn from the announcements; Forever is not playable yet, so treat specifics as subject to change until people are actually playing.

The dates that shape everything

• 17 September 2026 — beta. Running now, level cap 30. Useful for seeing the game, useless for building a raid roster.
• 4 November 2026 — launch. Live globally at 3:00pm PST. Everyone starts levelling at once.
• 9 December 2026 — the first raids. The Barrow Deeps, a maximum-level 10-player challenge, and Hyjal Summit at 20.
• After launch, no date given — Hardcore, the fourth ruleset, and a revamped iconic raid.

An "early access on 27 October" date is widely repeated and is not in either of Blizzard’s BlizzCon panel recaps. It may well be right. Plan your guild around launch day, which Blizzard has stated, rather than a date nobody has confirmed.

The gap between the last two is the part most guilds under-plan. There are five weeks between launch and any raid existing. That is five weeks where nobody can raid, nobody is geared, and the only thing that separates a guild that raids on 9 December from one that is still recruiting is whether it used the time.

Settle these before anyone makes a character

Every one of these becomes expensive to change the moment people have made characters around your answer, and the first one cannot be changed at all.

1. Ruleset and faction. Forever has no realms. Blizzard confirmed on 13 September 2026 that everybody shares one world and you pick a gameplay style instead. Three are available at launch — Normal, PvP and Roleplaying — and Hardcore arrives afterwards, so a guild forming for Hardcore is forming for something that will not exist on 4 November. This is the decision that cannot be undone, because Blizzard has said plainly that cross-ruleset grouping is not supported: you party, run dungeons and raid only with people who chose the same ruleset. A guild split across two is not a guild with a scheduling problem, it is two guilds. Faction still applies on top of that, so there are two answers to agree before anyone makes a character. Decide early, announce it loudly, and repeat it in every recruitment post.
2. What you are for. A 40-player roster and a 10-player roster are different guilds with different recruiting. Forever ships all three sizes at once (see the raid planning guide), so "we raid" is no longer a complete answer.
3. Raid nights and times. People pick guilds on schedule more than on anything else, and a schedule you publish in October is worth more than a better one you decide in November.
4. Your Discord, and who can do what in it. Roles, channels, and which officers can post raids. Doing this while nobody is levelling is much easier than doing it during launch week.

Run sign-ups before there is anything to raid

The instinct during a fresh launch is to wait until raids open before organising anything. It costs you the roster. The guilds that clear on week one of a tier are the ones that spent the levelling weeks finding out who actually shows up.

Concretely, in those five weeks:

• Post dungeon groups the same way you will post raids. Same sign-up flow, same confirmation habit. By 9 December everyone already knows how it works.
• Track attendance from the first week, not the first raid. Who turns up to a 5-player run at short notice is the best signal you will get about who turns up to a raid, and it is the signal you cannot go back and collect.
• Collect characters and specs as people make them. A roster assembled in pieces across five weeks is painless. The same roster assembled the night the tier opens is a bad evening.
• Decide your loot rules while nothing is at stake. Any loot system agreed before the first item drops is easier than the same system proposed after it.

Where Raidify fits

Raidify is a raid planner for WoW Classic: sign-ups collected through Discord or a public link, rosters built from real characters and specs, group layouts exported into an in-game addon, and attendance recorded automatically. Today it supports Classic Era, TBC Anniversary and Mists of Pandaria Classic.

Forever is not a supported version yet, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. What is being built, and roughly when:

• Around early access — Forever selectable as a game version, with rulesets in place of realms, character and roster syncing, Discord sign-ups, and the in-game addon loading on the Forever client.
• By the first raid tier — the raid side: instances, comps, buff coverage and loot tracking, which depend on facts that will not exist until people are inside the raids.

In the meantime, everything in the five-week plan above works today. Nothing about running sign-ups, building a roster or tracking attendance during the levelling weeks needs Forever support to exist — and a guild that arrives at 9 December with an attendance history is in a materially better position than one that arrives with a Discord channel.