What we know about every phase of WoW Classic anniversary realms, including 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 that we’ve become accustomed. While Blizzard hasn’t officially announced dates for future phases, we’ve used this and Phase 1’s December 12 launch date 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 — February 20, 2025

• Honor system and PVP rankings
• World bosses
• Alterac Valley and Warsong Gulch battlegrounds

Phase 3 — May 1, 2025

• Blackwing Lair raid
• Darkmoon Faire

Phase 4 — July 10, 2025

• Zul’Gurub raid
• Arathi Basin battleground

Phase 5 — September 18, 2025

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

Phase 6 — November 27, 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 we expect that pre-patch will launch sometime in early-January 2026 setting up a 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!