Hardcore is coming to World of Warcraft: Forever. It launches after the main game, in the winter window of Blizzard’s official roadmap, as one of the four rulesets you can choose from: Normal, PvP, Roleplaying, and Hardcore.
Hardcore is built for players seeking the ultimate challenge, where every decision matters and death carries lasting consequences. It also gets something new: a whole world of fresh quests, zones, dungeons, and items that nobody has solved yet.
How the Hardcore Ruleset Works
- A fully enclosed ecosystem. Hardcore characters group, run dungeons, and raid only with other Hardcore characters. As on every ruleset, Horde and Alliance stay separate.
- Death is not the end of your character. If a Hardcore character dies, you can transfer it to another ruleset, including PvP, and keep playing.
- Progress flows out, not in. Collections, progress, and rewards earned in Hardcore can become available on other rulesets. Progress from other rulesets does not flow back into Hardcore.
Hardcore and the Legacy System
Legacy Points and collections are account-wide across rulesets, with Hardcore as the exception described above. The Legacy System itself grew out of the Hardcore community: the developers loved seeing so many players leveling again and again, and built Legacy to reward that journey on every ruleset. Plan your perks in the Legacy Trees planner.
Get Ready for Hardcore
- Learn the road. Forever adds more than 1,000 new quests and nine new dungeons, so study the leveling guide and the zones before you risk a character.
- Pick a class you trust. Every class guide covers what Forever changed, and every class has a spellbook listing each rank by level.
- Level a Normal character first. Legacy Points you earn now build your account, and what you learn about the new world carries straight into your first Hardcore run.
Read the full announcement on Blizzard News