World of Warcraft Forever is about taking your time and exploring the world, rather than rushing to the end of the game. But despite the Forever team’s insistence on taking their time and making friends, one WoW Forever player has already reached level 60. Team JokerD, led by the streamer of the same name, was the first team of characters to reach level 60, and the team consisted entirely of undead characters and a troll. The Undead rush was important there, because Blizzard changed the Cannibalize ability to help you regenerate mana, which meant there was little to no downtime between massive pulls. I spent some time watching the feeds of these speedrunners, and they would gather entire groups of mobs to bombard them with AoE abilities. JokerD’s claim to fame was being the world’s first level 60 when World of Warcraft Classic launched in 2019, so it’s not too surprising that his team was the first to reach the level cap in Forever. There was a lot of competition this time, but the JokerD team was well ahead the entire race. Even as of this writing, the second-ranked character not part of the JokerD team is Ksuper Worldfirst, who is still at level 53. However, while it’s great that these players have already been able to reach max level, there isn’t much reason to rush to finish the game right now. The first raids, Barrow Deeps, Hyjal Summit, and Onyxia’s Lair, don’t open until December 9, so players who hit the level cap this weekend may have a hard time figuring out what to do next. When I interviewed WoW Forever lead game designer Kris Zierhut, he made it quite clear that Blizzard intends for players to level up various characters and reinforced that leveling up is an important part of the game. So if you manage to get to level 60 very early and run out of content before raids open, it might be worth starting with another character and taking a different path to max level. WoW Forever also had an extremely smooth launch and was largely free of any major server issues. But then again, Blizzard came out later and boasted that the game was running on over 200TB of RAM, so it would be a bit worrying if the servers were still crashing under the weight of players trying to log in. Jackie Thomas is IGN’s senior tech editor and the queen of PC components. He’s been covering gaming hardware for over a decade for IGN, TechRadar, Gizmodo, PC Gamer, and more. You can follow her @Jackiecobra
