World of Warcraft Forever gets its first level 60 three days after launch

World of Warcraft Forever already has a level 60 character, and the cap was reached less than three days after launch. According to IGN’s November 7, 2026 report, Team JokerD hit the milestone first even though Blizzard and the Forever team have pushed the mode as a place to slow down, explore, and meet other players rather than rush straight to endgame.

The first team to reach 60 was led by streamer Jokerd. IGN says Team JokerD was made up entirely of Undead characters and one Troll. That race choice mattered because Blizzard altered Cannibalize to help restore mana, which reduced downtime between large pulls and kept the group moving from one pack of enemies to the next.

IGN says the players were chain-pulling huge groups of mobs and killing them with area-of-effect abilities. The approach fits a speedrun mindset, but it also lines up with Jokerd’s own history in World of Warcraft: he was the world’s first level 60 when World of Warcraft Classic launched in 2019, so he entered Forever with a reputation for this kind of race.

A second report from Wowhead adds another layer to the finish. That article says the world first level 60 was claimed by a group of five leveling together at the exact same time, and that the race took almost 52 hours. Wowhead identified the five characters as Jokerd Prime, Burning Speed, Cloud Bells, Lmgd Mmr, and Vitochie Gofast.

Wowhead also says the team used a very specific setup to keep the run efficient. Its report says the Paladin pulled large packs of enemies and the mages used Arcane Explosion to burn them down quickly. The site adds that the group worked carefully to keep experience gains synchronized, because even a single experience point could leave one player behind. It says the last four percent of level 59 was the hardest part, with a great deal of math going into which mobs to kill and when.

How the race stayed so far ahead

IGN says there was plenty of competition in the race, but JokerD’s team stayed well ahead of the field throughout. At the time of writing, the closest non-JokerD character mentioned by IGN was Ksuper Worldfirst, who was still level 53. That gap shows how quickly the top group separated itself from the rest of the pack in the opening days of Forever.

The Undead race helped, but it was not the only reason the team moved so fast. Blizzard’s Cannibalize change let the group turn more of each pull into mana recovery, which meant less time sitting between fights and more time gathering the next wave of enemies. In practice, that let the team keep the same rhythm going over and over: gather, burn down, recover, repeat.

That kind of pacing is the opposite of the way Blizzard says Forever is meant to be played. Principal game designer Kris Zierhut told IGN in an earlier interview that Blizzard wants players to level multiple characters and that leveling is a major part of the game. The speed of this first 60 therefore does not cancel out the mode’s broader structure; it just shows how quickly a coordinated group can move when every member is built around the same goal. In a GAMER2GO report on launch, Blizzard also detailed Talebound and Trading Post rewards, both of which fit the wider progression loop around leveling rather than replacing it.

IGN’s report also notes that the launch itself was unusually smooth. World of Warcraft Forever was largely free of major server problems, which is notable given how much attention the mode drew as players rushed in over the opening weekend. Blizzard later said the game was running on more than 200TB of RAM, and IGN frames that scale as one reason the servers held together so well.

That infrastructure did not change the race, but it helped keep the launch stable while thousands of players pushed toward the same early targets. With the servers holding up and the first cap already claimed, the opening stretch of Forever has become a test of patience for everyone else still climbing.

Raid timers still leave a long wait

Hitting level 60 this early does not unlock the next stage right away. IGN says the first raids in World of Warcraft Forever — Barrow Deeps, Hyjal Summit, and Onyxia’s Lair — do not open until December 9. Players who reach the cap this weekend will still have time to fill before raid progression begins.

That delay is why the level race matters less as an end point than as a marker of how the mode is paced. Zierhut’s comments suggest Blizzard expects players to keep leveling and to do it on more than one character, so someone who runs out of things to do before December 9 is being pointed back toward the leveling game itself. A fresh alt is not a consolation prize here; it is part of how Forever is built to be played.

IGN also says the competition was active throughout the race, which makes the size of the lead even clearer. Team JokerD did not just edge out the field in the final stretch. The group maintained its advantage long enough that the chase behind them had not closed much by the time level 60 was claimed, and the only opposing name singled out in the report was still several levels behind.

Jokerd’s history gives this result an added sense of familiarity. He was first to 60 in Classic in 2019, and now he has helped lead the first team to the cap in Forever as well. The two races are not identical, but the pattern is obvious: when the goal is to reach the top first, his name tends to show up there.

For Blizzard, the early cap is a clean sign that players are already pushing deep into Forever’s leveling systems. For everyone else, it sets a clear deadline between now and December 9, when the first raids finally open and the next part of the mode begins to matter.