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. Blizzard has named two, and they are not the same size:

• The Barrow Deeps — a maximum-level 10-player challenge
• Hyjal Summit — 20 players

A third, 40-player raid is widely assumed and is not in either of Blizzard’s BlizzCon recaps. What those recaps do say is that “a revamped iconic raid” is coming after launch, without a date. Plan for two sizes in December and treat 40 as unscheduled rather than absent.

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 and 20 in the same week, on the same lockout calendar, for the same guild — and a 40-player raid is expected later, since Blizzard has said a revamped iconic raid is coming after launch.

The planning below is written for that shape rather than for a confirmed tier list. Where it says 40, read it as the size you should plan a roster around if that is the guild you intend to be, not as a raid with a date.

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 is genuinely new ground

Ten and forty are familiar. Twenty-five is familiar. Twenty is not a size WoW Classic has ever raided at, which means there is no established comp for it and no article anywhere describing one — including this one.

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

• Twenty players is four groups of five, not eight. If any buff in Forever is group-scoped rather than raid-wide, every group-scoped provider covers a quarter of the raid instead of an eighth — so each one 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.

Two questions are worth holding until the game answers them:

• Are totems and auras still group-scoped, or raid-wide? This decides whether group seating is a real optimisation problem in Forever or a solved one.
• Do the new race-class combinations change buff availability? Dwarf Shamans and Forsaken Paladins were announced, which means both factions may reach buffs they have never had. Faction-specific comp advice from vanilla may simply stop applying.

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. Do not pre-build a comp. Anything you assemble now is based on talent trees that are being redesigned. Decide your roster; leave the seating until the trees are real.

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. It supports Classic Era, TBC Anniversary and Mists of Pandaria Classic today.

Forever is not supported yet. The guild-side work — Forever as a selectable version, rulesets in place of realms, rosters, Discord sign-ups and the addon loading on the Forever client — is targeted at early access. The raid side follows the first tier on 9 December, because a buff model for a redesigned talent tree cannot be written before the talent tree exists, and a loot catalogue cannot be filled before anything has dropped.

Until then, the planner works for every version it already supports, and everything in the five-week list above is worth doing whatever tool you use.