WoW Forever Raid Planning — 10, 20 and 40-Man

World of Warcraft: Forever opens its first raids on 9 December 2026, five weeks after the 4 November launch. There are three, and no two are the same size:

• The Barrow Deeps — 10 players, eight bosses
• Hyjal Summit — 20 players, thirteen bosses
• Onyxia’s Lair — 40 players, one boss

All three are planned to reset weekly. Onyxia’s Lair needs every raider to carry the Drakefire Amulet, earned through a faction-specific attunement questline — so a 40-player roster has forty attunements to finish, and the levelling weeks are when to do them.

Everything below is planning you can do before the tier opens. It is worth saying plainly what this guide cannot be: nobody has cleared these raids. Forever is new content, so there are no boss lists to study, no loot tables to plan around, and no proven compositions. Anyone publishing those today is guessing. What is worth thinking about now is the structure, because the structure is already unusual.

More than one raid size at once, which Classic has never had

Every Classic version so far has had one size band. Vanilla was 40. The Burning Crusade was 10 and 25, and moving between them meant moving tier. Forever opens with 10, 20 and 40 in the same week, on the same weekly reset, for the same guild.

That changes recruiting more than it changes raiding. A guild has to decide:

• Which size is your main raid, because that is the number you recruit to and the one your schedule is built around.
• Whether the other two are guild runs or alt runs. A 40-player roster can field a 10 and a 20 out of the same people; a 10-player guild cannot field a 40 without becoming a different guild.
• Who gets the 10-player spots. Ten slots against a forty-player roster is the fastest route to a guild-drama thread, and it is much easier to answer before people have loot at stake.

Twenty players: ZG and AQ20 are a starting point, not the answer

Twenty is not new to Classic — Zul’Gurub and Ruins of Ahn’Qiraj were both 20-player raids, and plenty of raid leaders have seated one. What is new is a 20 in the first tier, next to a 10, on revamped talent trees. Comps from those raids were built for talents that Forever is changing, so borrow their shape and expect the details to move.

What can be said is arithmetic, and the arithmetic matters:

• Twenty players is four groups of five, not eight. The buffs that are still group-scoped (below) each cover a quarter of the raid instead of an eighth — so each provider is twice as valuable, and each seating mistake costs twice as much.
• Four groups means fewer places to put utility. In a 40, a spare shaman or paladin can go almost anywhere and still help somebody. In a 20 there are four decisions, and each one is a real trade-off.
• Role ratios do not scale linearly. Tank counts step in whole numbers, so a 20 is usually the awkward middle where you are choosing between two tanks and three rather than scaling a 40 down by half.

The talent revamp is the part to actually watch

Forever revamps talent trees and adds new abilities per class. That is the single most consequential announcement for anyone planning comps, and it gets much less attention than the new race or the new zones.

Raid composition in Classic is mostly buff arithmetic: who brings which aura, totem, blessing and debuff, and which of them stack. Every one of those answers comes out of a talent tree. If the trees change, every existing Classic composition guide is wrong for Forever on day one — including the ones on this site, which are about Classic Era and TBC and stay correct for those.

The beta answered the two questions that matter most. Both answers are from Blizzard and both could still be tuned before launch:

• Most group buffs are raid-wide now. Blizzard’s beta notes of 16 October made Battle Shout, Trueshot Aura, Leader of the Pack, Moonkin Aura and the Grace of Air, Strength of Earth, Windfury and Flametongue totems raid-wide, and Grace of Air no longer competes with Windfury or Flametongue. What the notes left alone still reaches only the caster’s group, as in vanilla — Mana Spring, Stoneskin, the paladin auras and Blood Pact. Group seating is still a real problem, but a smaller one, and it is now mostly about casters and tanks rather than melee.
• Both factions get both hybrid classes. Six new race-class pairings were announced — Gnome Priest, Human Hunter, Dwarf Shaman, Orc Mage, Troll Warlock and Undead Paladin — so the Alliance has shamans and the Horde has paladins. Comp advice that starts “on Horde, you have no paladins” stops applying.

Two smaller changes land in the same place: Blessing of Salvation became Salvation, which no longer takes a blessing slot, and Blessing of Kings, Divine Spirit and Improved Mark of the Wild no longer cost talent points, so every paladin, priest and druid brings them.

What to do with the five weeks before the tier

The levelling weeks are the only uncontested planning time you get. The guild setup guide covers the roster side; for the raid side specifically:

1. Pick your main raid size and recruit to it, rather than recruiting broadly and deciding later.
2. Settle loot rules before the first drop, especially across three raid sizes where the same player may raid all three.
3. Build the attendance record during levelling. It is the only fair input to who gets the ten-player spots, and you cannot backfill it.
4. Hold the final seating until launch. The buff changes above landed in the last week of the beta and could move again. Decide your roster now; seat the groups once the live game agrees.

Where Raidify fits

Raidify builds raid comps with per-group buff coverage, collects sign-ups through Discord, and exports the finished layout into an in-game addon that does the inviting and the group setup.

For Forever, the guild side works today — a Forever guild with its ruleset, recruitment, raid sign-ups in Discord or on the web, group planning and assignments. The in-game addon runs on Forever too: invites, groups, boss jobs, attendance and a built-in loot council. Buff coverage follows the beta notes above: the planner knows which totems and shouts reach the whole raid on Forever and which still reach one group. Forever's boss lists and loot data are not in yet. They follow the first tier on 9 December, because nobody can list bosses Blizzard has not named, and a loot catalogue cannot be filled before anything has dropped.

Everything in the five-week list above is worth doing whatever tool you use.