What we know about every phase of WoW Classic anniversary realms, including Phase 2’s launch on January 9 2025, and our best guess at release dates

World of Warcraft Classic launched a set of new anniversary realms — or Classic Classic, if you like — with new PVP, PVE, and hardcore servers in celebration of the game’s 20th anniversary. These new servers will give players a fresh start on realms with condensed player populations, reset economies, and some added quality-of-life changes like the group finder tool. Anniversary realms are a true reset of WoW Classic because each type of realm will experience the release cycle of all six Classic phases over the 2025 calendar year. Aside from other quality-of-life changes, we can expect that each phase will have the same content released during Classic’s 2019 launch.

Here’s what you can expect from each of the phases on these new realms, plus our predicted release dates.

At a glance, the Classic anniversary roadmap has given us a general launch window for each phase (aside from Phase 1’s December 12 announcement during the Warcraft Direct) and appears to follow the release cadence of the previous World of Warcraft release timelines of around every 10 weeks. In a surprise move, Blizzard announced that Phase 2 will actually release on January 9, 2025, less than a month after the release of Phase 1.

Blizzard hasn’t officially announced dates for future phases and the release of Phase 2 in early January rather than our March prediction (which would fall into the winter-spring window noted in the map) implies that each phase might be released earlier than we originally thought. There’s also a chance that Phase 2 could be arriving earlier because it brings more PVP aspects of the game online, and from there the phases will move into releasing every other month from there which makes more sense because if phases released every month then all phases would be rolled out midway through 2025.

Still, we don’t know what the plan is outside of the original map we were given so we’re taking this change into account alongside Phase 1 and Phase 2’s launch dates to guide our best guess as to when we think the other phases will launch on Classic anniversary realms. Here are our predicted WoW Classic anniversary realm phase release dates:

Phase 1 — December 12, 2024

• Molten Core raid
• Onyxia’s Lair raid

Phase 2 — January 9, 2025

• Dire Maul
• Honor system and PVP rankings
• Azuregos and Kazzak world bosses
• Alterac Valley and Warsong Gulch battlegrounds

Phase 3 — March 20, 2025

• Blackwing Lair raid
• Darkmoon Faire

Phase 4 — May 29, 2025

• Zul’Gurub raid
• Arathi Basin battleground

Phase 5 — August 7, 2025

• Ahn’Qiraj war effort
• Ruins of Ahn’Qiraj raid
• Temple of Ahn’Qiraj raid

Phase 6 — October 16, 2025

• Scourge Invasion
• Naxxramas raid
• Silithus world PVP

Eventually, the PVE and PVP anniversary realms will progress into The Burning Crusade Classic while the Hardcore realms will stay in the Classic Era. It is hard to when exactly TBC Classic will launch since winter-spring is such a large window but with Phase 2 launching earlier than expected, the TBC Classic pre-patch may launch sometime in December 2026 setting up a January or February 2026 release. These dates are just our best guess for the Classic anniversary realms and we’ll keep everyone updated on when each phase will release as soon we learn more!

Originally published on November 25, 2024. Updated on December 19, 2024.